Critical Evaluation

Name: Jing Deng

Student ID: DEN13390358

Course: MA designer maker

Context of the project

Our living in a same world, but the world is different for each individual, in this project, I am researching how to transform auditory messages to visual representation, in order to find a way to perceive sound by eyes.

There are two key words in the background : syneasthesia and cymatics.

Inspired by syneasthesia, I was thinking could ordinary people have the similar experience of syneasthesia? What will sound looks like? The second key word is cymatics, a study of visualizing sound by vibration. Synaesthete can experience mixing of sense, which makes they perceive the world in an extraordinary way. Cymatics offers physical methodology to visualizing sounds.

Practical process

The materials that have been tesked including wax, painting colors, resin and slip casting, but there are not suitable materials, because there are not flexible enough. It’s hard to change them by sound waves. At this stage I didn’t pick the specific sound, I just used the tone generator to create low frequency and high frequency sound.

Then I chose porcelain clay and use speaker instead of vibration generator because the surface of speaker is flexible than vibration generator. I also tried the different size of the piece, but when the piece was larger than 20cm diameter, they remains unchanged between different sounds because the large size is to heavy, and some sound vibrations are very subtle, especially when the sound frequency is over 200HZ.

The difficulty there is to control the thickness and humidity of the porcelain clay and to choose the suitable sound frequency, the only way to resolve the problem is keep trying. All the sounds are collected from our daily life, from morning to night, even the sound of snore. The whole group is a story of one person’s day.

For the display, it should be as simple as possible, without any visible hook or other adhesion material，fish wire is the perfect material on the back side. Furthermore, the pieces could match the video individually by QR code or numbering, all the videos will be upload to my personal website. On the final show, there will be an ipad to display the video as well.

Development

There are some points that I can improve. The first thing is the video, it should be recorded in the photo studio by the professional device, in that way, audience could see the slow-moving clearer. The second is that I can enlarge the range of sound, such as the sound by animal, the sound by different singer etc., then the increase of quantity could attract more attention, it could develop to the huge installation as a wall. Finally, as a non-functional installation, the ideal show place is gallery, sale as group instead of individually.

It is important to discuss this topic, which will encourage people to think what the real world is, and bring a fresh stimulation of senses which can show the invisible world and expand our perception for the environment around us.