For this week’s looking outward towards interesting phone captures apps, I wanted to highlight “Dolby On,” which I tried for the first time last year (2023). Dolby On has since become my go-to for audio recording since the sound quality seems to be better to me than other recording options I’ve tried on my phone and laptop.
I recently used Dolby’s recoding app in combination with some other tools to make an audio walk for my friend Revati. I made her a walking route on campus that passed by a bunch of my favorite tree species. I made the audio walk in an attempt to share a personal experience of moving through an outdoor space and noticing the trees within it. I combined a spoken audio track which I recorded using Dolby On with some clips of music that I like. I wanted to combine maps and audio and think about designing an experience based on place, movement, and speed.
In terms of the recording audio quality, unfortunately, I couldn’t avoid the sound of wind sometimes. Overall, Revati loved the walk – she didn’t get lost and she learned about some trees species she hadn’t heard of before.
Below are some images that indicate which tools I used to make the audio walk as well as the final walking route (I printed the map with the route and shared the audio mp3 file with her).
Another capture app that I investigated briefly is called MoCáp, which captures full body movements of one person and returns them as a motion file that you can open and edit in a software like Blender. I downloaded MoCáp just to see how it worked because I was curious about the apple watch being one of the compatible devices. While using it, I learned that the apple watch is used to stop the animation, which would be useful for motion capturing yourself. A limitation of this app is that it only detects motion of one person at a time and gets confused if you have multiple bodies moving in the camera view.
Outwards from June – Report 2: Joshua Ellingson’s Oscilloscope Clips
Here’s a super fun project by Joshua Ellingson titled Oscilloscope Clips for April-May 2022, where oscilloscope art is combined with Pepper’s Ghost illusions (really makes me want to try it!!) Basically, oscilloscope art is produced using a oscilloscope which is playing oscilloscope music (explained further with links below). The display from the oscilloscope is then projected using the Pepper’s Ghost technique so that it looks 3-D and as if it’s a hologram dancing to music inside of a glass shell.
I’ve found a lot of ‘sound visualizers.’ The simplest, most home-made (or high-school-science-classroom-made) project I found is Sound Visualizer & Chladni Patterns Formed on a Plastic Bucket // Homemade Science with Bruce Yeany I’m not sure if this is technically an oscilloscope, but it is definitely visualizing sound waves in a similar way. I think that what’s cool about Bruce Yeany’s sound visualizer is that it’s hand-held and easy to make! He also just seems like a super chill, nice guy and explains how the science and the set-up work in a way that’s easy to understand. There’s this other guy, Steve Mould, who made a similar sound visualizing device, but for his device to work he needs to put a Bluetooth speaker in a bowl, which is a more expensive set-up, and requires all sounds to be visualized to come from that Bluetooth speaker (as opposed to being able to capture live sounds and yell into it, like Bruce does). Finally, there’ a super cool video about called This is Music On An Oscilloscope – (Drawing with Sound) which shows how you can use an oscilloscope to draw things with sound and explains that you can actually make music to be enjoyed as oscilloscope music! In the video the first show how a track called “blocks” looks through the oscilloscope and they explain that this kind of music is created to be both audibly AND visually interesting.
I think all these projects are super cool, but I would be interested in getting them to visualize or capture vibrations in the environment that are just below our level of audio perception. Thinking about ‘the music of the spheres’ for example, from the previous post, I’d be interested in having an oscilloscope display not only making the invisible (sound) visually perceptible, but also making the inaudible (at least to human ears) AND invisible perceptible.
As for the sources that inspired Joshua Ellingson for this project, he states that he’s learned about the work of Jerobeam Fenderson & Hansi Raber and their OsciStudio utilities. He got the oscilloscope from a friend.
Outwards from June – Report 1: Intriguing Capture Device – Consider the Oscilloscope
A few weeks ago, I learned about Oscilloscopes, (I think I had heard about them years before in a physics class, but at that time quickly forgot about them). Technically, they are electronic test instruments that display voltage variation over time. Oscilloscopes capture variation in electric signals using various methods (which could be a post for another time). Oscilloscopes are useful in many different situations as tools that help people understand how electric signals are changing – people use oscilloscopes for troubleshooting automotive systems or even to display heartbeats as electrocardiograms.
Duddell’s Moving Coil Oscilliograph from 120 Years of Electronic MusicWave forms photographically recorded by Duddell’s ‘Oscillograph’ from 120 Years of Electronic Music
My personal interest in oscilloscopes is related to visualizing sound waves, ‘sound’ being famously hard to ‘see,’ besides the fact that human ears, or auditory receptors, are not attuned to perceive all the sounds, or rather, vibrations that exist in our surroundings.
oscilloscope display – interpreting music – source: https://gifer.com/en/8rSt
I really enjoy the idea of finding ways of translating sounds and vibrations into something visual. Of course, we have ways of perceiving vibrations, but it’s interesting to use a tool so that we can get another perspective or vantage point on that better illuminates how those vibrations behave. How might oscilloscopes be more effective? What the creators of the oscilloscope got right is that it’s an amazing analytical tool both to tune and troubleshoot with – I think it’s underexplored potential is as a creative tool. I was reading about William Duddell, who’s credited as the inventor of ‘the moving coil oscillograph’, which is a precursor to the oscilloscope. Apparently little William was some kind of prodigy who at only 4 years old transformed a toy mouse into an automaton by embedding clockwork within it. Duddell also is one of the first people to have created electronic music, using a device called the ‘singing arc,’ one of the first electronic oscillators. Duddell used his oscillograph creatively to play God Save the Queen and in doing so demonstrated that he could use his oscillograph to determine the precise conditions required to produce oscillations (and produce them in the sequence of a tune by wiring them to a keyboard). Some of the motivations for Duddell in making his oscillograph are linked to the fact that arc lamps which lit the streets made ‘audible humming, hissing, or even howling sounds,’ which was not ideal, so measuring the instability in their current was helpful and Duddell’s oscilloscope could do just that.
Harmony of the World from Ebenezer Sibly’s Astrology (1806)
I became interested in visualizing sound recently, after being captivated by a passage in the book When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. In it, there’s a mention of Johannes Keplerwho believed that there’s a melody produced by planets in motion around the sun. He called it the music of the spheres and thought that though human ears couldn’t hear this music, the human mind would be able to understand it. I thought the idea of the cosmic music of the spheres was so beautiful that I investigated it further and found that tons of artists and musicians have referenced it. One of my favorite passages is from a Lovecraft story — “His ears seemed at times to catch a faint, elusive susurrus which could not quite be identified with the nocturnal hum of the squalid streets outside, and he thought of vague, irrelevant things like the music of the spheres and the unknown, inaccessible life of alien dimensions pressing on our own.”
I’ll leave this at that for now!
P.S. please forgive me for violating the new media rules of the ‘looking outwards’ report as I have technically seen this tool before, but it was only a few weeks ago and I’ve been very interested in it since and have wanted to share it with people who it might also inspire (maybe we can someday work on a project together!)
