EDUCED AUDIO
2014 Senior Thesis exhibition, Ringling College of Art and Design
"To educe audio from an image is to play it as you would a sound recording."
-Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio by Patrick Feaster
During my second year of school in 2012, the basis of my thesis was formed while editing photographs from a studio exercise. Some call it the spirit of making- when you are simply sitting and working, and something hits you like wind, and after that moment you realize something new about the world and feel a need to make it real. It was in such a moment that I made a connection between the shape of notated music and the shape of a histogram. I took this realization in, found it beautiful, and made a small note in the back of my mind to do something with this new knowledge.
I spent a few years having countless conversations with friends, classmates, and professors about how to translate that kind of data and apply it to real work. At the time, I had seen more of a waveform in the histogram, and fought through different ways of educing the audio from it electronically. I also looked into existing ways artists have done similar work, listening to screeching frequency data and the sounds of tree rings and many other audio/visual projects. I found many fascinating ways people have already created connections between music and images, but had trouble forming a method for my own notations.
It wasn't what I wanted quite yet, so I got back to the basics of the idea- the shape.
I decided to "map" the histogram to the most universal notation of music. By placing the shape of an images data across 8 octaves, a set of music was created, and then played.
As a result, each image has a unique sound.
Self-portrait No. 7, 2014. Digital image.
This particular image was created as a part of Educed Audio in 2014, my final year at Ringling College of Art and Design. It is number 7 out of 15 self-portraits made to complete the first part of this work, focused on showcasing a new way to write music.
I plan to take this project much further, and begin developing a way to create stronger memories through this unique audio-visual link. As a form of musical and artistic therapy, and perhaps one day as a form of medical music, I would like to forge new paths into how we create memories that will last through diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia.
I believe that there may be a way to recall memories otherwise lost, using the proven effects music has on the human brain in a way that may help it re-wire after damage has occurred, or before it ever happens. Moving forward, work will be made and presented to various medical fields where music is heavily involved, in order to pursue musical medicine using this combination of audio and visual creation.
The histogram of Self-portrait No. 7, captured from the final edit of the image.
The notation below is a direct translation of the histogram, by hand, without the addition of a time signature or measures. Each note is as true as possible to the shape of the data represented. It can easily be played on a grand piano or classical guitar.
For more information about this project and how it is growing, please feel free to
follow along here on Behance or email me directly.
