I’ve come across a couple of articles in the past few days that relate to synaesthesia in science – Both use water (sonar and sound respectively) as the means of bending our senses in entirely new ways.
Navies have used sonar for generations to detect objects underwater, but researchers at Cardiff University have developed a way to produce three dimensional images using sonar. It’s not entirely clear how they’re doing it, only that it has been done. I can only speculate that they’re using two or more sonar pings at a time, using some sort of motor to sweep the area back and forth or cleverly utilizing a moving boat’s GPS position relative to a single (or more) sonar to create the map.
Given the low cost of consumer-grade sonar, this could pave the way to mapping rooms on the cheap if I read into what little I know about the technology correctly.
The second article focuses (pardon the pun) on the use of lasers as a means to transfer sound. According to the BBC article: “The approach focuses laser light to produce bubbles of steam that pop and create tiny, localised explosions” which means that both the acoustic information and the rate in which the bubbles pop could have meaning to the receiver. In the first instance, sound could be potentially sent from the air into the water at different speeds/ rates/ etcetera, much like the way morse or modem code behaves. The second potential is for another form of acoustic imaging, although this seems less likely given it requires mirrors which don’t seem to behave well under water.
This is a visualization of music I composed called “Number Station.” The visualizations are generated by the volume of each channel from the original multitrack file.
Generated using Processing and Minim libraries with 14 channels of streaming audio on an unbelievably fast machine.
WebMd wrote about a study published in Personality and Individual Differences about how creative types remember their dreams more often.
“There is a fundamental continuity between how people experience the world during the day and at night,” says researcher David Watson, a professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, in a news release. “People who are prone to daydreaming and fantasy have less of a barrier between states of sleep and wakefulness and seem to more easily pass between them.”
Here is the original post and great thanks to Agata for sending me the article.
I have been having serial dreams for as long as I can remember. “Serial dreams” are what I call them because I have dreams with overlapping landscapes with central themes. Sometimes seemingly opposing or different themes “break through” from one to the next with overlapping features or actions taken by the dreams themselves. There are people in these dreams, sure, but it is the landscapes and objects that bind them. The dreams are timeless and can span decades. If the narrative of dreams is spacial, then time lives somewhat outside of the narrative. How does the mind make connections between scenes that seem disparate or disjointed? What is the difference between awake and asleep?
A designed object is an object of interest. If the object is interesting, why not make it part of the narrative? A playstation/ Xbox controller can trace its roots in handicrafts or pottery, where the interaction is closed around the body and the actions all take place around a small area of a semi-circle. A wiimote is a shortened stick very similar to the style of stick our ancestors used to chip away at nuts and presumably write messages on the ground for one another. What makes the wiimote different is the ability of the person using it to transform it into a metaphorical object capable of becoming anything.
What would a narrative controller look like in the dream world? It couldn’t be something stationary. It couldn’t be something you hold on to.
A controller in the narrative world would have to have to be an embedded symbol or a type of motion that would work well in the dream landscape. An entirely gestural interface–One without a hand-held object would be the best.
If you were a video editor or small production studio and you wanted to lay down some music on a film, you could use Abaltat’s Muse.
But I see this technology as much more significant than a suggested attempt to put composers on the dole.
Mark Altekruse at Abaltat suggested that as a composer, I could use this to sketch out ideas. He was right: Inside of an hour I was inserting cue points into the timeline and adjusting instrumentation according to color information.
It was a much different composing experience. Instead of writing a piece of music and then plopping it down onto the scene, I could essentially work backwards. By laying down a sketch, I could think about what mood or depth of instrumentation I could use and work out the timing, instead of worrying about the details of the music too early on.
Muse's Color Timeline
The wonderful part is that Muse allows one to export sound files and midi files for placement (exporting cues to AAF files doesn’t seem to be an option yet) and for perfectly reasonable use.Changing the scale of the current composition is quite easy. I could see using Muse on a tight deadline.
What’s most exciting is that Muse is a truly synaesthetic tool for creating dynamic sound from image.
I just read one of Elaine’s postings and I’m getting quadruple déja vu. Is it possible to get your mind blown in four directions?
First I started writing on the notion of Dreams in narrative (1):
If the narrative of dreams is spacial, then time lives somewhat outside of the narrative. How does the mind make connections between scenes that seem disparate or disjointed? What is the difference between awake and asleep?
Then I started reading this wonderful book Expanded Cinema. In the forward, Buckminster Fuller talks about anticipation, which is not a surprise, because he’s one of the forefathers of cybernetic theory (2):
The comprehensively anticipatory
Design science revolution—
Being intent thereby
To make all of humanity
Successful in every sense.
The very first line of the book, Gene Youngblood writes (3):
The question what is life, says Norman O. Brown, turns out to be the question what is sleep. We perceive that the sky exists only on earth. Evolution and human nature are mutually exclusive concepts…When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded
consciousness.
