Golan Levin Reflection:
Overall, I thought Golan was an incredible artistic and musician. His ideal about linking sound and visual mediums together was incredible. He showed some very insightful videos that I have never seen before. One in particular stood out to me, which was the video of the oscilloscope images and it’s corresponding sound. The video he showed at first was the oscilloscope mushroom video.
Then showed the album made for oscilloscope by Jerobeam Fenderson.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1230242223/oscilloscope-music
The idea of bringing these images in to sounds is really interesting to me. Hiding messages isn’t something new however. Aphex Twin did it first with the face in the spectrum of his song “Equation”.
However, making an actual moving image out of these sounds is really fascinating. Being able to tell a visual story from what sounds like unintelligible noise is incredible. The sounds are clearly not related at all, but together create this visual masterpiece.
In the future, I could imagine a piece of music technology software that uses it’s DRM or serial number inside of the spectrum at non-audible range. Or sharing some kind of codec metadata in the spectrum of the non-audible range. Imagine being able to take a recording of an audio clip, and it having some kind of hidden text/data instructing another piece of technology on how to do something. Like an over-the-air instruction system. Or being able to encode these unintelligible noises into moving images and making a sort of video synthesizer from these crazy noises. Being able to transmit a video-like content over sound. Even newer technology from Teenage engineering, the pocket operator “PO-32” can transmit audio data over sound.
https://www.teenageengineering.com/products/po
I think the data transfer system is very similar to the Aphex Twin face in the spectrum, just with encoded data instead of an image. Golan really got me thinking about the possibilities of sounds that aren’t really just sounds, but also images as well. That even though they may sound unintelligible, they are very indelible in their own domain.