Towards the latter stages of my Ph.D., as my study has become increasingly focussed and specific, I feel that I’ve been tripping up occasionally trying to communicate my ideas effectively to others, failing to convey the subtleties and nuances of my praxis to a wider community of Art & Design researchers. While I appreciate the advice by one of my Supervisors - that if I’ve actually been successful at developing fresh insights and uncovering new knowledge in my field, then there are probably only a handful of people in the world who really understand what I’m talking about - I think it is more than this. As a musician interested in what sound might look like, I conceptualise my praxis through the ‘sonic lens’ of audition. This tends to locate my rational and reasoning outside of the generally visuocentric perspectives and occularisation of the discourse within Art & Design theory and practice. Still, I believe in the virtues of my transdisciplinary approach and want to share key aspects of my research with a broader audience. So I’ve conceived of a mechanism which attempts to locate my praxis within a framework of commonly held and generally understood Art & Design language, using these terms as ‘reference points’ within a wider Art & Design terrain. By identifying key themes and declaring whether my research is more this than that - e.g. more abstract than figurative, more temporal than spatial - I’m aiming for other practitioners to get a ‘fix’ on my practice, so that they can locate it more easily in relation to their own, see areas of overlap or common concern and appreciate how my position might compare or contrast with theirs.

I have both an artistic bent and an aptitude for science, so I’m engaged in that area of transdisciplinary activity commonly termed Sci-Art where these practices intersect and interact. I’m interested in exploring and revealing the patterns that surround us - those underlying, non-explicit, innate motifs that underpin the natural world but are frequently hidden from our senses. So my research involves a close examination of a natural phenomenon - stationary waves. When physical matter is vibrated with sound it adopts geometric formations that are an analog of sound in visual form. While these effects have been noted for centuries they are best described through Cymatics (from the Greek: κῦμα “wave”) - a study of wave phenomenon and vibration (Jenny, 2001). Dr. Hans Jenny coined this term for his seminal research in this area in the 1960s and 70s, using a device of his own design - the ‘tonoscope’. So a key method in my research has been to design, fabricate and craft a contemporary version of Jenny’s sound visualisation tool - a hybrid analogue/digital audiovisual instrument, The Augmented Tonoscope.

A Personal Research Statement (Illustrated) The Augmented Tonoscope - Lewis Sykes http://www.augmentedtonoscope.net

Reading Casey O’Callaghan’s Personal Research Statement encouraged me to write one of my own. I’ve since illustrated it with examples and links to online documentation from my own practice for Tacit - “a new e-journal and blog dedicated to debating and documenting new approaches to arts research practice, especially those enabled by evolving digital technology”.

A SketchUp ‘mockup’ of The Augmented Tonoscope prepared for my PhD interview Keynote presentation.

The Augmented Tonoscope presented at BEAM ’12, Brunel University, UK on 22nd-24th June 2012.

Despite the obvious evolution from it’s early conception, key elements - such as an analogue pattern making device, camera, screen/monitor and controller - are still central features of the instrument.

Located within an artistic context of ‘Visual Music’, the outputs of my research - sound responsive and interactive gallery installations, real-time visualisations of musical performances, short audiovisual films and live audiovisual performances - all attempt to show a deeper connection between what is heard and what is seen by making the audible visible. In fact I’m far more interested in this approach of audiovisualisation than the inverse process of sonification - of making the visible audible. While my primary focus is on sound as medium, I do aim to create ‘universal artwork’ in the tradition of Trahndorff and Wagner’s ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (Moss, 2013). Yet since music is essentially an abstract art-form my process is relatively unconcerned with the literal depiction of objects from the real world - and so my creative outputs are typically abstract rather than figurative and representational. (Or perhaps more accurately, even though my work reveals and depicts natural phenomena such as stationary wave patterns, since these are usually hidden from sight and so are unfamiliar to the viewer’s eye, they may as well be considered abstract.)

My research has been leading me towards fundamentals - to a reductionist, back-to-basics approach to exploring the real-time, elemental and harmonic correspondence between music and moving image. I use the techniques of artistic media to try and capture the essence of the audiovisual contract - its inner nature, its ‘significant form’. My work has no subject as such, the focus is on the aesthetic experience of compositional elements - with a preference for pure tones and solo instrumentation, a minimalist greyscale palette and a Euclidian geometry of line and pattern. The artistic value of the work is determined by its form - the way it is made, its purely sonic and visual aspects and its medium. So I’d argue that the artworks I produce, as described above, are essentially formalist in nature1 as opposed to iconographical - the study of the identification, description and the interpretation of the content of images.

• sound responsive and interactive gallery installations;

The Cymatic Adufe in Lisbon - exhibited as part of the 21st Century Rural Museum in MUDE – Museu do Design e da Moda, Lisbon, 16 May to 31 August 2013.

Some examples of the artistic outputs of my research:

• real-time visualisations of musical performances;

The Cymatic Cello, performed at UpClose 3, International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 26th March 2013.

• short audiovisual films;

Stravinsky Rose 1080p - a v2.0 edit in 1080p submitted to Colour Out of Space 2013.

• and live audiovisual performances.

Documentation of a performance with Ben Lycett at Seeing Sound 3, Bath Spa University, UK on 23rd-24th November 2013.

One of my more refined works that demonstrates this approach is Whitney Triptych - “Exploring the counterpoint in J. S. Bach’s Fugue in F minor BWV 881 (tuned to the Young temperament) by visualising the harmonically interdependent right and left hand parts of the Prelude each as a ‘Whitney Rose’ pattern with a third, central rose displaying the harmonic relationship between them.”

I’m interested in sensory multimodality (O’Callaghan, 2013:2) and in creating artistic experiences that engage with more than one sense simultaneously - although my current emphasis is on audition and vision. Reflecting on the oscillatory and periodic nature of the vibrations that generate sound made me wonder whether a search for similar qualities in the visual domain might create an amalgam of the sonic and visual where there is a more literal harmony between what is heard and seen. So my work is predominantly concerned with the phenomenal - that which can be experienced through the senses - rather with the noumenal - that which resides in the imagination and ‘inner visions’. In fact my research argues for an aesthetics of vibration and a harmonic complementarity between music and moving image.

I’m fascinated by how the interplay between sound and moving image might affect us perceptually. So with an artistic intent, I explore aspects of sensory-integration - the ‘blurring’ of the senses where each impacts upon the others to create a combined perceptual whole (Chion, 1990) (Macdonald & McGurk, 1978) (Shams, Kamitani & Shimojo, 2000). While I do reference aspects of Op art, also known as optical art, I’m not overtly trying to create perceptual illusion though my work. I suspect I’m looking for something more subtle and fleeting as I try and find those particular conditions under which an audiovisual percept - a combined sonic and visual object of perception - is not just seen and heard but is instead ‘co-sensed’ or ‘seenheard’ (McNeill,1992). In this way my research is focused on the perceptual as opposed to the cognitive - in how we perceive the world around us rather than how we interpret, contextualise and make sense of it.

I’m trying to apply my understanding of the philosophical nature of ‘sonic objects’ - as individuals located in space but with uniquely auditory characteristics that change over time (O’Callaghan, 2013) - to look deeper into sound’s relationship with image. I’m particularly interested in how sound can interplay with the qualities of visual objects (and moving image in particular) with their characteristics of or relating to space. Key to developing my thinking here has been the concept of the ‘musical gesture’ - of a shape created over time through music (Godøy & Leman, 2010). Either through the physical act of playing an instrument, or in the listener’s imagination through the structure of the music, or implied through a musical metaphor. Shifting to this perspective has helped me to appreciate that I’m actually more interested in movement, dynamic and transition than form, pattern and resolution - in short with the temporal rather than with the spatial.

The Whitney Modality, exhibited as part of WAYS TO ESCAPE_, 2022 NQ, Manchester, UK, 15th-23rd March 2013.

A relatively early (and hence quite raw) work that demonstrates my focus on the senses and perception is The Whitney Modality - “a digital artwork that creates an immersive audiovisual experience... The viewer sits on a bean bag, dons a pair of high definition video goggles and holds a monome – a minimalist, ergonomic 64-button controller in their hands. By exploring the buttons and tilt of the monome they control the relative pitches of two raw, electronic tones which are linked directly to hand-coded, real-time, dynamic animations based on an algorithm underpinning much of the work of the pioneering, computer-aided, experimental animator, John Whitney Sr.”

Some of my early research in this area is also outlined in a paper, The Eye Hears, The Ear Sees, presented at the Listening symposium, PARCNorthWest, International Anthony Burgess Foundation, UK on 17th November 2011.

AT Tests - easing functions - “Demonstrating how the various ‘tweens’ generated by Andy Brown’s Arduino easing functions animation library changed not just the way that the SWG [sine wave generator] moved between frequencies in a series of subtle but distinctly different portamentos to the ear - but also a visible difference in the transitions between the corresponding distinct cymatic patterns.”

This documentation of an early studio test shows that even at this stage of my research I was already less interested in the patterns per se and more interested in how manipulating the ‘shape’ of the movement between tones and their associated visual patterns affected the transition. As an aside, it also demonstrates my tactic of ‘misusing technology’ - utilising the ubiquitous ‘tweening’ functions of motion graphics to control sound.

Hans Jenny favoured practical experimentation over development of a mathematical model - an approach particularly relevant for a Practice as Research Ph.D. project. Yet I’m actually more interested than Jenny in the scientific nature of stationary waves. So I draw on derivations and formulas from physics and mathematics along with key aspects of Music Theory and particularly the Pythagorean laws of harmony, to code virtual models of a variety of oscillating and harmonic systems. I use the real-time computer animations generated from these models to visualise music. In this way my research is certainly more mathematical than free-form. I’ve also attempted to superimpose these animations on top of the cymatic patterns generated from the analogue tonoscope device that is part of my instrument. This allows me to augment the physical patterns of ‘visible’ sound that appear on the surface of the instrument’s vibrating drum skin diaphragm with forms based on similar physical laws, but which I can extrapolate and manipulate in ways I never could with the analogue. So in this way my work is more synthetic - an imitation of the natural world - than sampled - a small but representative part of the natural world.

I’ve explored the artistic lineage of my research by searching for prior attempts to find a visual equivalence to auditory intricacies. Accordingly, my main artistic influences lie with creators of early abstract film and somewhat later computer-aided abstract animation. I’m particularly interested in Oskar Fischinger’s synthetic sound production experiments in the 1920 and 30s (Fischinger, 1932). Using a technique of ‘direct sound’, of printing regularly repeating geometric patterns directly into the optical soundtrack of the film, Fischinger used the photoreceptor of the projector to turn visual forms directly into music and so explored a direct visual correspondence to sound (Moritz, 1976). From the 1940s onwards, John Whitney Sr. created a series of remarkable 16mm films of abstract animation that used customised analogue computation devices and early computers “to create a harmony - not of colour, space, or musical intervals - but of motion” (Alves, 2005:46). He championed an approach in which animation wasn’t a direct representation of music, but instead expressed a “complementarity” - a visual equivalence to the attractive and repulsive forces of consonant/dissonant patterns found within music (Whitney, 1980). Exploring Whitney’s legacy has become central to my research.

Moiré Modes v1.0, developed and performed with Ben Lycett at Seeing Sound 3, Bath Spa University, UK on 23rd-24th November 2013.Made with the C++ creative coding toolkit openFrameworks, this work integrates a Bessel function within the General Scientific Library to realise a virtual drum skin and display a series of its vibrational modes. This is an ideal - no real world drum skin would behave as perfectly as this. The Moiré effect - interference patterns produced by overlapping two transparent grids of closely spaced straight lines rotated a small amount from one another - helps visualise these normally imperceptible modes as the virtual drum skin ‘vibrates’. Although I’d conceived of creating Moiré patterns using my analogue tonoscope device it had proven too technically challenging to implement, but the virtual model allowed me to pursue this line of thought and develop a ‘proof of concept’.

Whitney Evolved, 9-12th February, 2012 - Kinetica Art Fair, P3, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS.

“Monomatic (Nick Rothwell & Lewis Sykes) with Noise Machine (Mick Grierson), pixelpusher (Evan Raskob) with computational design students from Ravensbourne and Transphormetic (Paul Prudence) present a series of real-time, code-based audiovisual works inspired by, interpreting and extending Whitney’s animated films – projected at large scale onto the rear wall of the P3 exhibition space throughout KAF ’12.”

In building an instrument to visualise sound, I’m following in a rich tradition of scientific instrument making whose primary intent was to extend our senses to be able to consider that of which we were previously unaware (Hankins & Silverman, 1995) - to ‘reveal the hidden’. This process is reflected in my praxis by attempting to be more systematic about searching for the ‘unfound’ through artistic process. I’m trying to find that small, (possibly) unnoticed detail or ‘never quite configured in this particular way before’ set of circumstances that open up new lines of enquiry and may lead to fresh thinking. I try to court serendipity - to master ‘the art of making the unsought finding’ - not just in the hope of the ‘happy accident’ but to open myself to the latent potentialities within my own creative code and DIY electronic devices.

There are other areas I haven’t written about yet. My work is more:• authored than improvisational; • literal than interpretive;• awe inspiring than illusory;• DIY than de rigueur;

and is concerned with:• sensory-itegration rather than synaesthesia;• form rather than narrative;• agency rather than the incidental;• the misuse rather than use of technology;

but I’m not really sure if I should go on so...

Having declared all this, I have to admit I’m not convinced this dualism is actually that useful a mechanism to me and my own understanding of my work as a network of inter-relationships, connections and congruences. My research doesn’t propose a hypothesis based on deductive rationalisation of established thinking within a discipline. I’ve taken a hermeneutic approach - informed by the concept of “systems thinking” proposed by Gregory Bateson and his notion of an “ecology of the mind”, of discovering “the pattern that connects” (Bale, 1992) - by combining years of implicit practitioner knowledge with an investigation into the lineage of my practice through the ideas, approaches and techniques of inspirational artists, alongside select research from a range of outwardly disparate disciplines that seemed to resonate with the study - from cognitive neuroscience to critical art theory. Divining a congruence between these varied perspectives has crystallised a central argument to my thesis - of realsing a harmonic complementarity and more intimate perceptual connection between music and moving image. What I think is significant in the context of a Practice as Research Ph.D. study, is that since limited literature exists, an empirical demonstration through artistic practice has been the primary approach to confirm the validity of the argument. The practice has actually been the research.

Footnotes:1. At least in an early C20th definition of formalism proposed by the Post-impressionist painter Maurice

Denis in his 1890 article Definition of Neo-Traditionism and by the Bloomsbury writer Clive Bell in his 1928 book, Art.

I participated in the Designing Our Futures The Writer as Designer/Designer as Writer course - two seminars and a 5-day Arvon Foundation workshop on offer to postgraduate and early career researchers from May 2014. During Arvon I was introduced to the idea of a ‘through line’ within a piece of writing - of the conscious theme, described by the title, that runs through and shapes the text. But I was also alerted to the notion of unconscious themes - of latent ideas that connect thinking, often revealed by studying extracts from seemingly unrelated writing or paragraphs out of their written order. The exercise of looking for these ‘hidden’ links resonated particularly strongly with me, helping me to appreciate this might in itself, be an unconscious strategy running through different levels my research - of looking for those things that are present yet liminal - concealed in the spaces in-between.

Sources (ordered to correlate with their first reference within the text):• Jenny, H. (2001) Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration. New Hampshire: Volk, J. (first

printed as Vol 1 1967, Vol 2 1972)• Moss, S. (2013) ‘A to Z of Wagner: G is for Gesamtkunstwerk.’ The Guardian. [Online] 18th April.

[Accessed on 14th July 2013] http://www.theguardian.com/music/ musicblog/2013/apr/18/a-z-wagner-gesamtkunstwerk

• O’Callaghan C., (2013) ‘Hearing, Philosophical Perspectives.’ In H. Pashler (T. Crane) (eds.) (2013) Encyclopedia of the Mind. SAGE. [Online] [Accessed on 29th May 2013] http://caseyocallaghan.com/research/papers/ocallaghan-2013-Hearing.pdf

• Bell, C. (1928) Art. London: Chatto and Windus• Maurice, D. (1890) Definition of Neo-Traditionism, Art and Criticism, Aug 1890 - in Harrison, C., Wood, P.

and Gaiger J. (eds.) (1998) Art in Theory 1815-1900: an anthology of changing ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.862-9

• Chion M. (1990) Audio-Vision: Sound of Screen. New York, Columbia University Press.• Macdonald J. & McGurk H. (1978) Visual influences on speech perception processes. Perception &

Psychophysics, Vol. 24 (3), pp. 253-257• Shams L., Kamitani Y. & Shimojo S. (2000) Illusions: What you see is what you hear. Nature, Vol. 408,

Dec. 14, p 788• McNeill, D. (1992), Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press• Godøy R.I. & Leman M. (eds.) (2010) Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning. New York &

London, Routledge• Fischinger, O. (1932) “Klingende Ornamente” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Kraft Und Stoff. 30, [Online].

http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/SoundOrnaments.htm [Accessed on 7 Apr 2011]• Moritz, W. (1976) “The Importance of Being Fischinger”, Ottawa International Animated Film Festival

Program, 2-6. [Online]. http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/library/ImportBF.htm [Accessed on 10 March 2011]

• Alves, B. (2005) ‘Digital Harmony of Sound and Light.’ Computer Music Journal, 29(4) pp. 45-54.• Whitney, J. (1980) Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art. Peterborough,

N.H.: McGraw-Hill• Hankins T.L. & Silverman R.J. (1995) Instruments And The Imagination. New Jersey: Princeton University

Press• Bale L. S. (1992) Gregory Bateson’s Theory of Mind: Practical Applications to Pedagogy. [Online]

[Accessed on 7th May 2013] http://www.narberthpa.com/Bale/ lsbale_dop/gbtom_patp.pdf