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.
It’s hard to think that a shot time ago, it was hard to make electronic music. 50 years ago, the first experiments in electronic music were made in Milan. That equipment is now preserved at the Museo degli Strumenti Musicali of Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Here is a magnificent set of photographs of the studio.
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.
It’s now more than possible to create online tools that were once only possible on your desktop. I use Picnik, a tool for editing photos on Flickr and Adobe has taken the boxed version of Elements and fabricated it online.
Hobnox has introduced its audiotool, a companion music making machine to their musician community. This is the first comprehensive audio tool in AS3 and a new twist on the musician community idea. Most examples from a few years back tried to incorporate live “jamming,” which suffered from the same problems video conferencing had.
I see both ideas converging in the near future.
Warning it’s in German, but music knows no linguistic boundaries:
If you’ve ever been to London you might recognize the voice of Emma Clarke, the (now former) official voice of the Underground. Her site features the spoof hilarious voiceovers that got her fired, plus a very thesis-relevant commercial voice construction application. Have a look.
