For a start, some of the keywords that I rooted for wanted to be a huge part of my FYP.

From the keywords, I branched out to several more words for the quality that I want in my final work.

*3 keyword definitions from dictionary.com. The rest annotations came from me.

Since starting my research, I’ve found some great DIY videos on the internet that helped me with experimentation. I came across one that taught me how to build a laser pickup. The solar cell I’ve clipped onto the cable produces certain electrical pulses that triggered sound in the amplifier. I found that this is something very fundamental in creating sound way back in the days.

I started out wanting to create a rotary system (similar to that of a phonograph/vinyl player). The rotary system will read the analog visuals that I’ve created. An iteration that I’ve thought of so far is a tube of cardboard roll with perforated holes and markings that the laser can pass through and create a percussive series of impulses that gets input into the amplifier output.

Then I went on to find out that my method is actually how the first recording worked.

From Audio Engineering Society

1877 – Edison made the first recording of a human voice (“Mary had a little lamb”) on the first tinfoil cylinder phonograph Dec. 6 (the word “Halloo” may have been recorded in July on an early paper model derived from his 1876 telegraph repeater) and filed for an American patent Dec. 24.

So I went on to read See This Sound: Audiovisuology and came to learn more about the history of music recording, corresponding relationships between sight and sound and so on.

Some of the notes I’ve picked out from reading the segment called :

On Hearing Eyes and Seeing Ears: A Media Aesthetics of Relationships between Sound and Image 

Birgit Schneider

1. “Around the year 1900, currents and waves were considered the universal currency of hearing and seeing, in the 1990s, this function was taken over by the digital code, which seems to fuse genres in the “universal machine” of the computer.”
2. There are too many ways to connect hearing and seeing to each other. This amount of artists and artworks out there testify to this.
3. Subjective results in the perception and audio and visual relationship.
4. Sonification vs Visualization:  1929: Fritz Winckel carried out the thought experiment of Du Bois-Reymond who asked what will happen if the separate modes of sensory perception can be exchanged? He didn’t do this to his own senses of course. He used Mihaly’s television system, which was partially mechanical and broke down images with the means of perforated Nipkow disk . The result was appealing moire like images that altered its appearance to the rhythm of the music.
5. By contrast, Winckel was not as enthusiastic about the changing images into sounds. He felt that the sound of an image could only reveal whether it is a photograph, a black and white drawing, a manuscript, or a fingerprint.  Further test did not allow for much differentiation as well.  “synchronization beats at each line drowned everything out” due to the requirement of the technology.
6. Patterns from music are harmoniously constructed whereas sound from image created the sound of interference.
7. Dadaist artist Raoul Hausmann came up with an Optophone that could control not only sounds but also images at the same time. His apparatus produced sound and image simultaneously. The player can choose to engage with the output of either sense at one time or both at the same time for their artistic improvisation.

Week 6 Progress:

Initially, I figured that the digital output and processing would be important. After consulting this week, Ina pointed me to a direction that shifts more of the focus on the analog and input aspects and also to experiment with modularity. Will update as I go along.