Introduction

Hello. I’m Lewis Sykes, currently in the 2nd year of my Practice as Research PhD project - The Augmented Tonoscope - at the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

Firstly, I welcome this opportunity to be amongst peers who are intimately familiar with the context of my study. It makes such a refreshing change.

I was planning to present some half-baked ideas about a tension I suspect there might be between the acts of watching and listening and how this might impact on the creation of audiovisual work. But I’ve changed my mind.

Instead I’m going to show lots of images and videos that illustrate the practical development of my PhD project.

So to start, my research question: How far can artistic investigation into Cymatics - the study of wave phenomenon and vibration - contribute towards a deeper understanding of the interplay between sound and image in Visual Music?

Central to answering this is for me to design, fabricate and craft my own hybrid analogue/digital instrument to explore the aesthetics of cymatic patterns and forms - the Augmented Tonoscope.

Here’s an early ‘artists impression’ of what the Augmented Tonoscope might look like in a gallery setting. Though this contains most of the essential elements - a physical device with a control interface that produces an analogue visual output, captured by camera and projected on a screen, overlaid with a digital visualisation - you’ll soon see it’s already developed beyond this initial conception.

Presentation at Seeing Sound 2, Bath Spa University, UK, 29th and 30th October 2011. This is a ‘script’ of the ‘talking to slides’ presentation I gave at the symposium - reconstructed from memory, my presentation notes and also some subsequent research and writing. While it lacks the spontaneity of the original presentation, it’s probably more erudite though it’s also much longer because I’ve since included plenty of things I probably didn’t mention.

The thumbnail guides are complete… but to avoid duplication of text I’ve:• linked to rather than included my ‘A Visual Music Manifesto’ which seems to deserve its own post -

http://phd.lewissykes.info/a-visual-music-manifesto/;• not included text for the final section on my prototype analogue tonoscopes. Initially I thought my working

journal entry on ‘Experimental Development’ might provide the basis for this section - but I’ve ended up documenting and critiquing my studio experiments in far more depth than I was able to do in my presen-tation so it too is a separate post - http://phd.lewissykes.info/experimental-development/;

The video of the slideshow is online at - http://vimeo.com/38349207.

I’m doing this from scratch - currently focusing on the design and build of analogue prototypes - including a custom-made Sine Wave Generator driven by the Arduino platform. I’m using micro controllers, open sound control and open-access fabrication technologies because they are the tools of this time at my disposal. I’m actually interested in trying to identify, explore and hook into some underlying paradigms that can inform and guide my practice and research.

So what motivated me to undertake this PhD?

Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored...

I’ve been a musician for more than 30 years and experimenting with visuals for not much less. I’ve performed, recorded and produced work with numerous ‘barely’ notable bands and studio production projects and audiovisual creative partnerships and artistic collaborations.

I started using computers to make music back in 1989 with Creator on an Atari ST. Not long after I began freelancing as a graphic designer using Aldus PageMaker 3.0 on a Windows 3.1 Intel 386 home PC. Bar the analogue pursuits of playing live bass guitar, DJing with vinyl and making ‘hand-drawn’ experimental film I’ve used computers for my creative outputs ever since.

I’ve spent the past decade or so focusing my interests through an MA in Hypermedia Studies at the University of Westminster in 99-00, curating audiovisual experimentation for the sound, music art and technology festival, Cybersonica and pursuing my own artistic practice in audiovisual collectives such as The Sancho Plan.

Yet I pretty much stopped making music in 2009.

I haven’t really analysed why I withdrew from an activity that was so familiar to me. I understand myself well enough to know that my ‘creative self’ has natural peaks and trough and my praxis has its own pulse and trajectory - and currently that’s been learning to code in Java via Processing and more recently making physical sonic things using Arduino. But in the process of undertaking a PhD I’ve had to contemplate, to make my implicit practitioner knowledge explicit.

I’ve also started to read, consider and engage with contemporary philosophy and strategies of thought, to explore the possibility that they are important in illuminating/analysing/deconstructing the visual and experiential aspects of what surrounds us, to apply these theoretical models to wider practice within my field and to situate my own work within current critical debates.

So a recent lecture and reading of Martin Heidegger on boredom - The First Form of Boredom: Becoming Bored by Something switched on a light in my head (despite him being a Nazi).

Had I become bored of making music? And not just in a superficial way - of feeling a bluntness in operating all too familiar music software, a dullness in the intricacies of the systematic production process, a tedium in the everyday act of making music - as Heidegger asserts these feelings are just a ‘shadow of boredom’.

I suspected I’d become deeply and ‘profoundly’ bored with the process of making music using computers… as Heidegger describes, I’d “drifted into a remarkable indifference”.

But Heidegger also argues that this condition of boredom is also a condition of thought and only by engaging with it will we understand ourselves in more detail. Moreover it can be useful if used in the right way. It describes a condition of potentiality, of a state of creativity, of being about to produce something.

I think this is in large part why I started my PhD and why my research has focussed at its outset on audiovisual fundamentals. Getting back to the essential building blocks of Visual Music and trying to look long and deeply at the simple interplay and elemental relationships between sound and image.

A Visual Music Manifesto

http://phd.lewissykes.info/a-visual-music-manifesto/

Cymatics

This image shows a relatively common view of Cymatics - a non-Newtonian fluid such as corn starch in water vibrated in a speaker cone.

The term Cymatics (from Greek: κῦμα “wave”) was coined by the researcher Dr Hans Jenny (1967, 1972) who studied this subset of modal wave phenomena using a device of his own design - the ʻtonoscopeʼ.

Jenny’s work has no prior or subsequent match in terms of a detailed empirical investigation into the effect of sound and vibration on physical matter.

I was inspired by this excerpt from a documentary on Jenny. If he could produce such an engaging and direct link between what you hear and what you see almost 50 years ago then what could I realise using the technology, computational power and access to a global network of knowledge currently at my disposal?

Of course a recognition of the effects of sound on materials dates back much further than Hans Jenny - most notably the German physicist and musician Ernst Chladniauthor of Discoveries in the Theory of Sound (1787) who documented the patterns that emerged when a metal plate sprinkled with sand was bowed with a violin string.

This apparent geometric quality of cymatic forms, displaying clear harmonic relationships, has been explored more recently by John Telfer through Cymatic Music (2011) - his “audiovisual science and music project investigating the possibilities of creating a system of visual, or rather visible music”. Telfer also asks if cymatic patterns can be interpreted musically but argues that Equal Temperament - the thirteen equally spaced steps of a keyboard octave embedded in the piano and fretted string instruments which has dominated Western Music since the C18th - obscures the fact that this musical structure actually has harmonic inconsistencies.

He responds with his theory of harmonicism - a system of proportional Just Intonation - and his work in developing the two distinct harmonic and arithmetic progressions (overtones and undertones) of the Pythagorean Lambdoid (which re-emerged in the C19th in its completed form as the Lambdoma matrix) as a practical creative resource in music.

Telfer favours manufacturing acoustic musical instruments to interpret the harmonicism within the Lambdoma matrix but recognises - and to my mind points to - the possibility of an electronic (and digital) approach which I plan to adopt.

Benlloyd Goldstein’s Cymatica (2009), “An architectural thesis investigation exploring the synthesis of spatial proportion and form generated from sound” explores Cymatics as a means to reveal a deeper understanding into spatial form.

As well as a wide range of contemporary artistic output exploring Cymatics: Carsten Nicolai – Milch (2000);

and Thomas McIntosh with Mikko Hynninnen and Emmanuel Madan – Ondulation (2002).

Key artistic influences include experimental film-makers John and James Whitney - pictured here with an early iteration of their ‘analogue computer’ built in the late 1950s by converting the mechanisms of World War II M-5 and M-7 Anti-aircraft Gun Directors.

Later in his career John Whitney Sr. created a series of extraordinary films of abstract animation that used early digital computers to create a harmony - not of colour, space, or musical intervals - but of motion. He championed an approach in which animation wasn’t a direct representation of music, but expressed a “complementarity” - a visual equivalence to the attractive and repulsive forces of consonant/dissonant patterns found within music. In Digital Harmony (1980) he hypothesises that “Composers will discover a congruence of aural-visual partnership… grounded on valid harmonic interrelationships equally applicable to sound and image”.

As John Whitney declares in Digital Harmony, ”the purpose is to document my own approach and propose the seminal idea of making an approach.” His book is a constant companion in my backpack.

Starting from scratch...

So I found myself a cheap studio space in an old Mill… and started from scratch….

fabricating my own studio furniture on the Shopbot at Fab Lab Manchester.

I looked at various iDevice Apps for inspiration into the functionality I’d like to see in custom-made tone generator…

and then prototyped this functionality into an Arduino/AD985 based sine wave generator…

while also starting to think about ergonomics of its design.

I’d soon developed the early prototypes far enough to exhibit as part of State Of Play… an exposition of practice-based research in progress, RIBA Hub, Manchester, 4-10 July 2011. The table-top installation, part art project and part science experiment, included:

• a latest iteration of the Sine Wave Generator;

• a Frequency Measurement device accurate to .01Hz based on a DIY project from Lab III - the Laboratory for Experimental Computer Science, Academy of Media Arts Cologne;

• two types of tonoscope device - based on a Celection Truvox 1525 15” speaker and a Rolen Star 30W Transducer with repurposed kitchenware vibrating surfaces - complete with ant-vibration bases;

• driven by a DIY 100Watt Tripath TK2050 amp;

which collectively produced the outputs demonstrated in this video.

I also started to adapt commercial products - for example:

• reworking components from the iJerry mp3 ‘table-top’ speaker in the MMU Metal Workshop so that I could screw custom made cymatic plates onto the transducer;

• and fabricating a new casing for the PS3 Eye camera out of 3mm acrylic.

I also started to develop my own devices (with help from electronics guru Mike Cook) - such as this super bright 16 LED light ring driven by the extremely compact NXP PCA9685 16 LED 12 PWM driver chip which when driven by an Arduino can behave as a flash, strobe, variable brightness and LED sequence chaser…

as well as trying to extend the functionality of my existing equipment - such as the CAMremote 2A Pro device with my Canon S95 - “a highly integrated miniature remote control devices for cameras and camcorders”.

Experimental Development• http://phd.lewissykes.info/experimental-development/