Looking Outwards 4: Carolina

For this week’s focus on sound art, I chose to explore Jono Brandel’s (jonobr1) Android experiment collaboration with artist Kimbra on her song “Carolina.” The experiment is a mobile app that essentially takes the user through an animated digital road trip. As the song plays in the background, various shapes, figures, and lines appear against a white background, creating the illusion of the user driving by. The abstract shapes and colors are triggered by specific sound aspects of the song, such as instrumentation and pitch. The user can also pinch to zoom in and out and change perspectives in the app, in order to fully experience the digital road trip to Carolina. As for the coding part of the experiment, Brandel uses Three.js in order to code the actual music visualization. While I don’t actually know anything about Three.js, I would imagine it differs from p5.js for a bigger emphasis on animated computer graphics (and more complex graphics).

Carolina (July 22, 2015)

This project stands out to me because it not only puts music into a visual art form, but also takes into account the meaning behind the song for creating that visual. The variations in shape, color, placement, and movement are not just reflections of the sounds of the music, but also take into account artistic sensibilities as to what would count as an abstract road trip through Carolina.

For more information on the project, to get the code, or download it on Google Play, click here.