Comments on: Waves of Evidence: God, Like You’ve Never Seen Before

By: funglish

funglish — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:18:44 +0000

Marc, very good interview yes he was somewhat dark, but I dont really know how he could have been any different in light of our recent history. To be frank, I dont know how he keeps from falling into despair when you have plumbed the depths of historic greatness, and the characters who contributed (at least from a standpoint of their intellectual depth and resource)to the degree that he has, it gets lonely. It is difficult because mountain peaks have a lot of solitude, and few have gained their height so as to commune. I think he is a great man.

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By: Allie Goldfuss

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By: Mark Fischer

Mark Fischer — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:12:24 +0000

"rendered with a program similar to Photosounder and published in the London Telegraph, is a great example:"

No, they were not. They were rendered with a wavelet transform. This is not the doodling software used to make cute squigglies for WinAmp. The structure and symmetry seen in the sound, /comes from the sound/. It is not an artifact,

As to "the computational processes used to render them were designed by people who probably share many of our own standards of beauty"; what you are saying, then, is that wavelets are designed by people with a sense of beauty. Many mathematicians probably feel that way, true– but you will find 'beauty' no where in the formal definition of a wavelet. A function that is square-orthogonal and integrable qualifies.

Many of these sounds are /designed/, not just randomly emitted, you can not escape the fact. They are made with awareness and intention, almost down to each vibration. Spend some time with them. You'll see.

Mark Fischer // AguaSonic Acoustics

By: Ben Tausig

Ben Tausig — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:57:57 +0000

Hey Rob,

In saying that visualization is the standard best mode for reading data, I'm simply referring to graphic abstraction. Charts, graphs, and statistics are, in essence, reductions of events (which we always experience through multiple senses) into static pictures that we can study. Of course, it's been wisely pointed out that we can also reduce events through auditory representations, and that we can know the world at a remove through sound just as well as we can through image. But that was the basic idea.

In the meantime, I can't thank you enough for the references, which I'm excited to check out.

By: rob mullender

rob mullender — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:11:20 +0000

the great guy sherwin put it best – 'the only true relationship between the auditory and the visual is time'. but you're on the right track here regarding inferred truth (although i would disagree that visualization is the standard best mode for reading data – what kind?).
the interesting question to ask about inter-medial art (and particularly sonification) is why people believe that it does what it does; that's where 'truth' is to be found. the relationship inheres in the technology, and the sedimented and complex set of assumptions about sound, vision and the body (and often commerce) that each technological object, be it software or machine, represents.
that levin paper is a gem. the first two chapters of James Lastra's 'sound technology and the american cinema' really nails the historical context for this stuff as well IMO. i can also recommend – Hertz P (1999) Synaesthetic Art: An Imaginary Number? Leonardo, 32(5) pp. 399-404. Michigan: MIT Press – and Andrey Smirnov's research into the Russian work into this stuff in the 1920's and '30's is an essential contribution.

By: Jack

Jack — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:53:46 +0000

I recently watched a documentary about an only-just-avoided nuclear apocalypse in 1983. One of the people featured was a top East German agent who was embedded at the highest levels in NATO, and used the opportunity to photograph secret documents which were then translated into sound bursts for transmission. Here's the film, the whole thing is well worth a watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpxbpeuSQyA

By: Ben Tausig

Ben Tausig — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:27:02 +0000

Andrew: Thanks for the reference. d/ling now.

By: araffodewar

araffodewar — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:01:34 +0000

I would recommend checking out the following article on Rudolph Pfenninger's 1930s experiments in hand-drawn sound, which is germane to this topic as a historical precursor:

“Tones from out of Nowhere”: Rudolph Pfenninger and the Archaeology of Synthetic Sound
Thomas Y. Levin
Grey Room 12, Summer 2003 pp.32-79.