3D Sound Sculpture

About:

Artists and thinkers have been attempting to visualize music and sound for a long time. The field of music visualization is one field that has greatly benefited from technology. It has it roots in the world of dance, where choreographers created an expansive vocabulary using the human body to give visual life to music. Later light, lasers, and computer graphics were all used to attempt to enhance the experience of listening to music by creating visuals that react to music's various subjective traits.

However, technology can also be used to empower the audience to create themselves without any sort of prior experience or training. The 3D Sound Sculpture is an example of that sort of art. Instead of taking a preexisting piece of musical work and interpreting it, what the artist aims to do is create interactive palettes of color, shape, and sound and a empty canvas for the participant to fill the blanks in. This in itself presents a new challenge for sound artists and composers, and will spark a new style of composition to match this new way of presenting music to the public.

Using simple playful building blocks, the user can build his or her own sculpture and listen to the spatialized sounds of the cubes creating the illusions of 3D Sound. 3D graphics provide a powerful spatial quality that 2 dimensional shapes can't duplicate.

By building a sculpture out of multiple sound cubes, there is less emphasis on a conventional linear style of playback and more emphasis on the interesting interactions between neighboring sound cubes in three dimensional space. A simple interface and system of building encourages more natural forms of surprise and complexity.

Technology is a powerful artistic medium for experimentation and interpretation. It can allow us to encounter things from a different perspective, it can empower us to easily try new forms of expression that we didn't know we could do, and it can create an immediate collaboration between the computer and individuals to create an infinite number of new experiences.

Technical Notes:

This software allows the user to create a 3D sound sculpture using 3D cube building blocks by selecting a color (which corresponds to a particular note or sound) and clicking wherever they want on the sculpture to attach another cube. The cubes rotate in the direction of the cursor on the screen, and the cubes that roll under the cursor play back their corresponding sounds in the apparent direction of the moving sculpture. Using the right mouse button, the user can zoom in or out on the sculpture.

The program ws created in Macromedia Shockwave Director 8.5 using Shockwave 3D and Digital Audio technologies. Digital Performer was used for the editing and mixing.


	About: Artists and thinkers have been attempting to visualize music and sound for a long time. The field of music visualization is one field that has greatly benefited from technology. It has it roots in the world of dance, where choreographers created an expansive vocabulary using the human body to give visual life to music. Later light, lasers, and computer graphics were all used to attempt to enhance the experience of listening to music by creating visuals that react to music's various subjective traits. However, technology can also be used to empower the audience to create themselves without any sort of prior experience or training. The 3D Sound Sculpture is an example of that sort of art. Instead of taking a preexisting piece of musical work and interpreting it, what the artist aims to do is create interactive palettes of color, shape, and sound and a empty canvas for the participant to fill the blanks in. This in itself presents a new challenge for sound artists and composers, and will spark a new style of composition to match this new way of presenting music to the public. Using simple playful building blocks, the user can build his or her own sculpture and listen to the spatialized sounds of the cubes creating the illusions of 3D Sound. 3D graphics provide a powerful spatial quality that 2 dimensional shapes can't duplicate. By building a sculpture out of multiple sound cubes, there is less emphasis on a conventional linear style of playback and more emphasis on the interesting interactions between neighboring sound cubes in three dimensional space. A simple interface and system of building encourages more natural forms of surprise and complexity. Technology is a powerful artistic medium for experimentation and interpretation. It can allow us to encounter things from a different perspective, it can empower us to easily try new forms of expression that we didn't know we could do, and it can create an immediate collaboration between the computer and individuals to create an infinite number of new experiences. Technical Notes: This software allows the user to create a 3D sound sculpture using 3D cube building blocks by selecting a color (which corresponds to a particular note or sound) and clicking wherever they want on the sculpture to attach another cube. The cubes rotate in the direction of the cursor on the screen, and the cubes that roll under the cursor play back their corresponding sounds in the apparent direction of the moving sculpture. Using the right mouse button, the user can zoom in or out on the sculpture. The program ws created in Macromedia Shockwave Director 8.5 using Shockwave 3D and Digital Audio technologies. Digital Performer was used for the editing and mixing.