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1.01 ‘Circles Within Circles’
Simon F A Russell
This video, created by freelance animation director Simon Russell, is one in a series of explorations on sonically generated geometry. He uses a program called Houdini, a plug-in commonly used with Cinema 4D, to generate 3D particle simulations that emit audio pulses from particle data (such as collisions, position on the canvas, etc.) In this sequence, a particle burst generates the first tone which sets the precedent for the following tones. The outer and inner ring also emit a constant tone. A Plexus-like effect, as Russell describes it, generates other tones based on the heights of the circular drawings.
As a musician, it’s really fascinating to see how other musicians interpret sound because it is almost always never the same. Sound is a highly intimate sensation and is internalized within us from a very young age. Our interpretations and projections of sound, music and raw noise alike, are a reflection of a deeper aggregate of personal influences, preferences, inspirations. When we hand off the task of interpretation to a computer, we see a collaboration between the preferences of a human and the logic of a highly sensitive machine- it is a joint effort between the person who has influenced the program with their associations with sound and the computer who can grab pieces of data that humans simply do not have access to or are too complex to grasp. These things include frequencies below or above our range of hearing, precise decibel and frequency levels that can be compared and contrasted relatively to others, and of course the potentiality of representing these datums in an orderly and beautiful way. In Russell’s video, we can see manifested the representations of the 8 note scale and how the laws of physics applies to the perception of sound. Really data-vis!!!