5 ms·

The woman who could 'draw' music

134 points by happy-go-lucky 9y ago

dang 9y ago
Previous Daphne Oram submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=daphne%20oram&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=daphne%20oram&sort=byDate&date...
kevinwang 9y ago
She seems like a kindred spirit with Kandinsky. Both tried to connect the audio and the visual arts, and both were mystical about the fundamental humanness of their respective art forms.
ssalazar 9y ago
Oh wow. I am days away from finishing a PhD thesis on sketching sound and music [1], and Daphne Oram figures highly into my background research. A friend of mine built an iPhone app that emulates Oram's system [2]. Another notable figure in the world of drawing music is Norman McLaren, who literally painted or drew directly on the soundtrack portion of his animated films. The soundtrack for his film Neighbors [3], which won an academy award in 1952, was produced this way. Theres a short documentary on his process here [4]. On the more avant-garde side, Iannis Xenakis had designed a computer-based system called the UPIC in the late 1970s in which you could directly draw waveforms and then direct their frequencies over time by drawing into a graphics tablet. He used this to compose his piece Mycenae Alpha [5]. This page [6] has a really great run-down of optical synthesis in general, which includes a number of individuals and systems involved in directly drawing sound and music. Some of the visual sound designs used in these systems are quite striking, for instance the variophone [7] or Yankovsky's painted soundtracks [8]. [1] Demo of my research software here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdj5e82nPHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdj5e82nPHQ [2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oramics/id454505541?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oramics/id454505541?mt=8 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-o9dYwro_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-o9dYwro_Q [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0vgZv_JWfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0vgZv_JWfM [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yztoaNakKok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yztoaNakKok [6] http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html [7] http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/vario3.jpg http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/vario3.jpg [8] http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/painted_soundtrack.jpg http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/painted_soundtrac...
- mmjaa 9y ago
  Neat links, thanks for the references. Would be very interested in knowing more about your thesis when its something you're able to share .. One wonders what Daphne would have thought of tools such as yours, and as well of course things like U&I's MetaSynth: http://www.uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/ http://www.uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/
  - ssalazar 9y ago
    For sure. Its a long-ish video, but I defended a few months ago. The recording is online, and hits all of the major points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4xZQxVVnJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4xZQxVVnJA Maybe Ill post a Show HN here when I publicly release the app over the summer.
- onirom 9y ago
  This is a very interesting way to draw music, lately i have done some experiments with something akin to the Russian ANS synthesizer which was a photoelectronic synthesizer where the sound spectrum was sketched onto glass disks, in my program all is driven by visuals produced by a GPU fragment shader, one can use a webcam as a texture to replicate something akin to the ANS workflow where you draw the sound spectrum although it is much less limited, one could also capture a painting software and feed their drawing in realtime. The synthesizer is available here : https://www.fsynth.com https://www.fsynth.com
  - ssalazar 9y ago
    Whoa, very cool. I like the integrated live coding aspect.
- sdnguyen90 9y ago
  I have a hard time visualizing FM algorithms and Auraglyph looks like it would be really useful. When will it be available?
  - ssalazar 9y ago
paulgerhardt 9y ago
As adults we get locked into modal thinking - breaking those modes is not something we (usually) do naturally. As children those modes aren't so deeply grooved so coming up with arbitrary models of the world makes for a lot of eye-opening exploratory activity. I recently went to an exhibit on the Reggio Emilia approach (famous for pioneering this method 70 years ago) and one of the videos on display was an activity involving the children drawing sound [1] - I hadn't thought to look at the world this way but for these kids (and a bit of guided prompting) it came very naturally. Things like painting the sound of water rushing over stones[2] - at first glance don't parse - but if you tilt your head a bit you can 'see' it. [1] http://www.acousticecologyaustralia.org/symposium2003/proceedings/papers/hDilkes.pdf http://www.acousticecologyaustralia.org/symposium2003/procee... [2] http://imgur.com/a/RAOmy http://imgur.com/a/RAOmy
dmix 9y ago
There was a year long exhibition of her Oram synth machine in 2013. Here's a good mini-doc on it and Daphne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ08diPUv6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ08diPUv6A Not entirely unknown fortunately.
100ideas 9y ago
The woman who 'painted' music: "Unraveling Bolero" by Anne Adams - http://imgur.com/a/wkwKZ http://imgur.com/a/wkwKZ (photograph of work) --- > "In this podcast, a story about obsession, creativity, and a strange symmetry between a biologist and a composer that revolves around one famously repetitive piece of music. > "Anne Adams was a brilliant biologist. But when her son Alex was in a bad car accident, she decided to stay home to help him recover. And then, rather suddenly, she decided to quit science altogether and become a full-time artist. After that, her husband Robert Adams tells us, she just painted and painted and painted. First houses and buildings, then a series of paintings involving strawberries, and then ... "Bolero." > At some point, Anne became obsessed with Maurice Ravel's famous composition and decided to put an elaborate visual rendition of the song to canvas. She called it "Unraveling Bolero." But at the time, she had no idea that both she and Ravel would themselves unravel shortly after their experiences with this odd piece of music." Radiolab - Unraveling Bolero (S14E01) http://www.radiolab.org/story/217340-unraveling-bolero/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/217340-unraveling-bolero/ --- > "Most neurological lesion studies emphasize performance deficits that result from focal brain injury. Here, we describe striking gains of function in a patient with primary progressive aphasia, a degenerative disease of the human language network. During the decade before her language deficits arose, Anne Adams (AA), a lifelong scientist, developed an intense drive to produce visual art. Paintings from AA's artistic peak revealed her capacity to create expressive transmodal art, such as renderings of music in paint, which may have reflected an increased subjective relatedness among internal perceptual and conceptual images. AA became fascinated with Maurice Ravel, the French composer who also suffered from a progressive aphasia, and painted his best-known work, ‘Boléro’, by translating its musical elements into visual form. Later paintings, achieved when AA was nearly mute, moved towards increasing photographic realism, perhaps because visual representations came to dominate AA's mental landscape during this phase of her illness. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that, despite severe degeneration of left inferior frontal-insular, temporal and striatal regions, AA showed increased grey matter volume and hyperperfusion in right posterior neocortical areas implicated in heteromodal and polysensory integration. The findings suggest that structural and functional enhancements in non-dominant posterior neocortex may give rise to specific forms of visual creativity that can be liberated by dominant inferior frontal cortex injury." Seeley, W. W. et al. Unravelling Boléro: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior neocortex. Brain 131, 39–49 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awm270 https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awm270 (note- edited for formatting)
colanderman 9y ago
Don't forget the man who could 'see' music, by looking at grooves in a vinyl record: http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/362661/vinyl-vision-meet-the-man-who-can-identify-a-record-by-its-grooves.htm http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/362661/vinyl-vision-meet-the-man-...

dang 9y ago

Previous Daphne Oram submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=daphne%20oram&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=daphne%20oram&sort=byDate&date...

kevinwang 9y ago

She seems like a kindred spirit with Kandinsky. Both tried to connect the audio and the visual arts, and both were mystical about the fundamental humanness of their respective art forms.

ssalazar 9y ago

Oh wow. I am days away from finishing a PhD thesis on sketching sound and music [1], and Daphne Oram figures highly into my background research. A friend of mine built an iPhone app that emulates Oram's system [2]. Another notable figure in the world of drawing music is Norman McLaren, who literally painted or drew directly on the soundtrack portion of his animated films. The soundtrack for his film Neighbors [3], which won an academy award in 1952, was produced this way. Theres a short documentary on his process here [4]. On the more avant-garde side, Iannis Xenakis had designed a computer-based system called the UPIC in the late 1970s in which you could directly draw waveforms and then direct their frequencies over time by drawing into a graphics tablet. He used this to compose his piece Mycenae Alpha [5]. This page [6] has a really great run-down of optical synthesis in general, which includes a number of individuals and systems involved in directly drawing sound and music. Some of the visual sound designs used in these systems are quite striking, for instance the variophone [7] or Yankovsky's painted soundtracks [8]. [1] Demo of my research software here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdj5e82nPHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdj5e82nPHQ [2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oramics/id454505541?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oramics/id454505541?mt=8 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-o9dYwro_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-o9dYwro_Q [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0vgZv_JWfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0vgZv_JWfM [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yztoaNakKok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yztoaNakKok [6] http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html [7] http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/vario3.jpg http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/vario3.jpg [8] http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/painted_soundtrack.jpg http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/painted_soundtrac...

mmjaa 9y ago
Neat links, thanks for the references. Would be very interested in knowing more about your thesis when its something you're able to share .. One wonders what Daphne would have thought of tools such as yours, and as well of course things like U&I's MetaSynth: http://www.uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/ http://www.uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/
- ssalazar 9y ago
  For sure. Its a long-ish video, but I defended a few months ago. The recording is online, and hits all of the major points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4xZQxVVnJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4xZQxVVnJA Maybe Ill post a Show HN here when I publicly release the app over the summer.
onirom 9y ago
This is a very interesting way to draw music, lately i have done some experiments with something akin to the Russian ANS synthesizer which was a photoelectronic synthesizer where the sound spectrum was sketched onto glass disks, in my program all is driven by visuals produced by a GPU fragment shader, one can use a webcam as a texture to replicate something akin to the ANS workflow where you draw the sound spectrum although it is much less limited, one could also capture a painting software and feed their drawing in realtime. The synthesizer is available here : https://www.fsynth.com https://www.fsynth.com
- ssalazar 9y ago
  Whoa, very cool. I like the integrated live coding aspect.
sdnguyen90 9y ago
I have a hard time visualizing FM algorithms and Auraglyph looks like it would be really useful. When will it be available?
- ssalazar 9y ago

paulgerhardt 9y ago

As adults we get locked into modal thinking - breaking those modes is not something we (usually) do naturally. As children those modes aren't so deeply grooved so coming up with arbitrary models of the world makes for a lot of eye-opening exploratory activity. I recently went to an exhibit on the Reggio Emilia approach (famous for pioneering this method 70 years ago) and one of the videos on display was an activity involving the children drawing sound [1] - I hadn't thought to look at the world this way but for these kids (and a bit of guided prompting) it came very naturally. Things like painting the sound of water rushing over stones[2] - at first glance don't parse - but if you tilt your head a bit you can 'see' it. [1] http://www.acousticecologyaustralia.org/symposium2003/proceedings/papers/hDilkes.pdf http://www.acousticecologyaustralia.org/symposium2003/procee... [2] http://imgur.com/a/RAOmy http://imgur.com/a/RAOmy

dmix 9y ago

There was a year long exhibition of her Oram synth machine in 2013. Here's a good mini-doc on it and Daphne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ08diPUv6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ08diPUv6A Not entirely unknown fortunately.

100ideas 9y ago

The woman who 'painted' music: "Unraveling Bolero" by Anne Adams - http://imgur.com/a/wkwKZ http://imgur.com/a/wkwKZ (photograph of work) --- > "In this podcast, a story about obsession, creativity, and a strange symmetry between a biologist and a composer that revolves around one famously repetitive piece of music. > "Anne Adams was a brilliant biologist. But when her son Alex was in a bad car accident, she decided to stay home to help him recover. And then, rather suddenly, she decided to quit science altogether and become a full-time artist. After that, her husband Robert Adams tells us, she just painted and painted and painted. First houses and buildings, then a series of paintings involving strawberries, and then ... "Bolero." > At some point, Anne became obsessed with Maurice Ravel's famous composition and decided to put an elaborate visual rendition of the song to canvas. She called it "Unraveling Bolero." But at the time, she had no idea that both she and Ravel would themselves unravel shortly after their experiences with this odd piece of music." Radiolab - Unraveling Bolero (S14E01) http://www.radiolab.org/story/217340-unraveling-bolero/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/217340-unraveling-bolero/ --- > "Most neurological lesion studies emphasize performance deficits that result from focal brain injury. Here, we describe striking gains of function in a patient with primary progressive aphasia, a degenerative disease of the human language network. During the decade before her language deficits arose, Anne Adams (AA), a lifelong scientist, developed an intense drive to produce visual art. Paintings from AA's artistic peak revealed her capacity to create expressive transmodal art, such as renderings of music in paint, which may have reflected an increased subjective relatedness among internal perceptual and conceptual images. AA became fascinated with Maurice Ravel, the French composer who also suffered from a progressive aphasia, and painted his best-known work, ‘Boléro’, by translating its musical elements into visual form. Later paintings, achieved when AA was nearly mute, moved towards increasing photographic realism, perhaps because visual representations came to dominate AA's mental landscape during this phase of her illness. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that, despite severe degeneration of left inferior frontal-insular, temporal and striatal regions, AA showed increased grey matter volume and hyperperfusion in right posterior neocortical areas implicated in heteromodal and polysensory integration. The findings suggest that structural and functional enhancements in non-dominant posterior neocortex may give rise to specific forms of visual creativity that can be liberated by dominant inferior frontal cortex injury." Seeley, W. W. et al. Unravelling Boléro: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior neocortex. Brain 131, 39–49 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awm270 https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awm270 (note- edited for formatting)

colanderman 9y ago

Don't forget the man who could 'see' music, by looking at grooves in a vinyl record: http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/362661/vinyl-vision-meet-the-man-who-can-identify-a-record-by-its-grooves.htm http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/362661/vinyl-vision-meet-the-man-...