Sonic Visualisations
Thoughts...
Rob says:
“Music or sonic visualisations are a very common practice for musicians and coders. Using number captured from audio and converting into pixels is a relatively straightforward activity. I must confess to finding most digital sonic movies a ‘bit of a yawn‘ and I quickly became fed up with creating images that pulsed to a beat, which appears to be the norm for many VJs. Perhaps this is because we have got so used to the idea that we ‘see’ sound wherever we hear it? However, visual analysis of sound has taken place for centuries and I have always felt drawn to these early ‘physical’ (and analogue) physics experiments.
Thanks to an award from Santander, I was able to visit my colleague Stephen Morris in Toronto, May 2015. Part of Stephen’s research regards ‘shaking things’ and sound is often used as a form of stimuli. The purpose of my visit was to photograph some of the early classic physics experiments created by Chladni and Faraday. It’s my aim to use these photo’s for this...”
Faraday Instability
Faraday discovered that a liquid undergoing vertical vibration is unstable to surface waves. Also known as Faraday waves or Faraday ripples, they form non-linear standing waves that appear on liquids enclosed by a vibrating vessel. When the frequency of the vibration exceeds a certain value the surface becomes unstable.
In the images created with Stephen Morris, the waves on the surface of a fluid are being shaken vertically (by a loudspeaker placed under the container). We experimented with both water and cooking oil and found that water makes quite disordered patterns because its viscosity is low. We noted the transient concentric waves driven by the sides of the round container.
Ritual - Cheltenham Festival 2016
Images of Faraday Instability - Rob Godman and Stephen Morris, June 2015
Stephen Morris - J. Tuzo Wilson Professor of Geophysics, University of Toronto, Canada