Computational analysis of sound driving generated visual elements – are widespread in contemporary media arts, and its aesthetics are more diverse.
In custom-coded audio visualizations artists such as Marius Watz and Robert Hodgin construct visualizations tuned to specific soundtracks; the automatism of digital synesthesia animates specific, constructed worlds of form and image. The algorithm becomes an endlessly variable and dynamic intermediary between sound and image.
Marius Watz’s generative art workshop 2007
Roberts Hodgin’s workshop
In a simpler, (omitting or significantly reducing the computation) approach, artists like Carsten Nicolai or Robin Fox are connecting the audio and video directly. This method can be referred to as transcoding, sound and image are linked through a direct transfer of signal, a simple cross-wiring.
In his work “Backscatter”, Australian artist Robin Fox used a custom-built digital synthesizer and plugged the audio into an oscilloscope. This hybrid instrument enabled Fox to explore a territory in which a signal is simultaneously heard and seen. Each and every sound is a form in motion, every form is a sound. This direct cross-wiring of sound and image manifests the sensory cross-over of synesthesia or even induces the synaesthetic actuality. The interchange between sound and image is immediate and intense; the audio-visual relation is completely fluid, somehow self-evident and obvious, yet perpetually astonishing.
It may seem that most of the contemporary audio-visual work is based on transferring the audio signal into an image. Andrew Gadow proceeded to explore the same audio-visual relationship from the opposite side – transferring the video synthesizer’s signal into sound, which becomes modulations of a 50Hz hum.
In those works, we can clearly see the analogy to synesthesia as a neurological phenomenon. In digital media art sound and image are essentially the same thing – a piece of electronic information, bits, signals. The mapping of perceptual structures onto technical reality.
The analogy provides a mapping that aligns subjective sensation with audiovisual signals; maps perceptual or even neurological structures onto a technical format. For Robin Fox and Andrew Gadow, the map is found, rather than constructed; it is embedded in the medium. Fox plugs his computer into an oscilloscope, which automatically maps the left and right channels of the audio signal into the x and y axes of its display. This audiovisual relation is in a sense a readymade, existing cultural/technical artefact. Its process is literally hardwired, embodied in the analogue electronics of the scope.
