Viewing Golan Levin’s presentation was refreshing. It is always nice to take a step back from working in a very specific field or genre and to take in different flavors of the art. I had never given visual aspects of music much serious thought, and Golan’s collection of personal experiences and youtube videos gave me some serious perspective into how Golan thinks about the interaction between sound and visuals.
The historical aspect was interesting in particular to me; I did not know previously that waveforms could be printed and read with film without a digital or magnetic interface. I can appreciate a little bit more the convenience of being able to shape waveforms how I choose on the computer with fancy programs.
Lissajous patterns on oscilloscopes are incredibly fun to watch. They are made twice as interesting because of the nutty amount of testing and detail that goes in to create certain aesthetics. I bet some of the formulas for making a shape of a face or a car take up dozens of exponents, coefficients, and sinusoidal functions. It makes you think, maybe these images can be mathematically derived with a program? Is it possible that some of these artists have created these patterns as images first?
After some research, I found out that the guy who does “Oscilloscope Music” videos does a lot of his work with PureData, or at least a lot of simpler shapes. I can’t find out if he does use a software to convert images to sound, but he does reference this software which is currently in development to change 3D models into sound.
This is such a crazy way of creating music, but very cool.