Monday, August 23

Chladni Plates and Music with Creative Arts

The overtones of each sound become visual and because sound tends toward consonance, even the "discordant" (out of tune overtones) become visually as a repetitious sand wave, and thus wave in the air. This demonstrates exactly how and what hits our ears in a more two-dimensional format.the sound is quite obviously a 3-D thing and the swirls of almost Baroque shapes would astound even more than this exhibition. If sand could be made to sit on an Algebraic x-y-z axis, then you would get a better idea of the 3-d shape. Permutation and filling out the curves would then be a facility. The oscilloscope gives a bit of this, as does the "visualizations" that are now ubiquitous for viewing on our home computers. Because the "visualizations" are oscilloscope based one can imagine a purer form with Chladni shapes alone. There may be someone doing this visual-aural research, but I am not aware of anyone that is....that is, except possibly us.
Note how the demonstration has the person touch the plate at a few places--this "damns" up the sound by dampening the extra yet not total vibration of the bowing.
From a visual point--I know that the Futurists, Man Ray in his film and overlays, and especially Oskar Schlemmer all were fascinated by this sort of visual creation. The "Triadic Ballet" uses costuming that create light forms of the curves with red, blue and green light. Re-creations of this work are the only things that exist and the best have been done by Oskar's own daughter.
The DaDa-ists made a number of films using visual images of repeating form--within a decade these were fully co-opted into the "Deco" motif and became a style that was conceived as pure Art-Deco, even to the consuming masses. Machines create a mechanical picture & repetition is a form natural process tends to; thus the shapes we saw became a symbol of the times. Futurism through Roussolo was this for the ear--but to most it was horrifically un-listenable. New composers deal with these issues and quite often---this is to their credit as well as courage to dare to work with such demanding parameters for composition. Audiences almost invariably dislike or outrightly hate it.
Ballet has worked with ideas like this for decades: not so purely scientifically but not without important influences.
Onward----more research to be done: this is one of my subjects for certain !

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