Live Performance

So me and Dale played live on tuesday, here are some video and audio shot by Anne.
Dale plays his cassette tape images as scores that are also instruments, I am generating audio from my modular and video from DIY circuits and a fed back video mixer. I'm playing solo in London on Saturday here .

F.C. Judd

The work of Frederick Charles Judd previously neglected somewhat by the history books, has over the last few years received renewed interest due to Ian Helliwell's work. Ian's articles, films and exhibitions have collected and disseminated many of Fred's forgotten work and ideas. One of these was his Chromasonics system, which effectively combined CRT based Lissajous figures with a high speed colour wheel to allow full colour display of the electronic images with movement generated by sound. Fred also wrote a series of articles in Practical Electronics magazine on how to construct such a system as well as other audio visualization techniques such as colour organs. Fred is now recognised as an important electronic and tape music composer with a re-issued collection of works available here.

I wanted to focus on his visual work, so here are a series of scans from my collection and some links.

www.fcjudd.co.uk

ianhelliwell.co.uk/practical_electronica

public-info.co.uk/electronics-without-tears

Here are some stills of the images generated by the 

Chromasonics system 

They are very reminiscent of work by Ben F. Laposky although moving rather than static photographs. Fred was also aware of the Oramics system build by Daphne Oram which also used CRT's. Orams system however used them to turn images of waveforms into electronic signals rather than visualise the sounds themselves. Ian's film Practical Electronica contains some footage Fred created of the Chromasonics system in action. below is a full colour image from the cover of Practical electronics. Fred's work on audio definitely inspired wide range of experimenters, I wonder if any visual work by his readers survive. 

Here are some images the construction of the Chromasonics system notice the large colour wheel that synchronised with the refresh rate of the displayed images so as to selectively colourise different signals allowing for multi colour display.

Here are some stills of Chromasonics and the trailer for Ian's film

These are some clippings of the the displays Fred developed.

And finally a few pics of Fred at work creating sound!

Practical Electronica will be screened on Tuesday in London link to the event here 

Joy to the World by William Laziza (1994)

Recovered by the XFR STN project, Joy to the World is Visual Music designed for ambient presentation. Joy to the World combines, optical image processing, Amiga graphics and recursive video imagery with synthesized sound. What is unique about this piece is that the audio is used to create the visuals is also the sound track. This work was created at the Micro Museum.

https://archive.org/details/XFR_2013-08-11_1A_01

Photoacoustics

Photoacoustics as a word is now used in association with various methods of studying electromagnetic activity via acoustic detection in medical and scientific contexts. Originally Alexander Graham Bell & Charles Sumner Tainter discovered the ability to modulate a light source using sound and inversely modulate a sound producing membrane using light when working on their Photophone optical telecommunications system. This line of thinking starting around 1880 with the Photophones invention and continuing right up to the 1920s, eventually made possible inventions like optical sound on film (with all these technologies being indebted to the even earlier discoveries of the photoelectric properties of materials such as selenium). Sound on film interests me a lot in both it's exploitation in the early 20th century by artists and purely for it's interesting technological development. I have gathered a lot of information about the creative use of sound on film but I also became interested to find evidence of still images that recorded sound (also see earlier post on the eidophone) so anyway the first two images are I believe of Bell's experiments from a really cool blog on photography  Homemade Camera 

Second are some images produced by Robert W. Wood using single wave fronts
 produced by sparks, the latter image is a diagram based on the first, I believe.

Last up is the Phonodeik an instrument designed by Dayton Miller
that allows the photography over time of complex sound waves. It
reminds me very much of the earlier Phonautograph but with a
photographic output.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_sound
http://homemadecamera.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/photoacoustics.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Wood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren_photography

http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/Phonodeik
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonodeik
http://www.phys.cwru.edu/ccpi/Phonodeik.html
http://courtneyjl.wordpress.com/
http://dssmhi1.fas.harvard.edu/

I have allot more stuff to include on this subject including cymatics and optical sound experiments which I left out to cut down the size of this post, but if you have any interesting links I always welcome tips in the comments

Margaret Watts-Hughes and the Eidophone

Back many years ago now when I was beginning to research drawn sound work more heavily Rob Mullender very kindly let me look at the Oramics machine up close in his workshop (I think Mick Grierson who let me look at the Oramics archive also had something to do with it but I am a sieve brain) Rob makes some very cool work which deserves it's own post (and will get one some day soon) but I couldn't resist re blogging and adding to his post on Margaret Watts-Hughes a very early cymatics pioneer. Please visit Robs blog and check out his links as he plumbs some really interesting audio visual depths and returns from the mines with some rare gems!

http://silentlight.blogspot.co.uk/

https://vimeo.com/user3179219

Margaret Watts-Hughes was a Welsh soprano who gave up singing when she married, to concentrate on philanthropy and scientific research. Her Eidophone images developed in 1885 resulted from experiments with measuring the intensity of voice through vibration of seeds on a membrane, she then developed this process to enable her to capture images and as Rob points out also created some early time based media as she began dragging the Eidophone's membrane across the glass as she sang creating a sort of "proto optical sound recordings; although admittedly not in an analytically useful sense like the 'Phonautograph's', but rather more beautiful" Very Pioneering work. 

Other sources:
https://sites.google.com/site/appliedbiophysicsresearch/sound/cymatics/margaret-watts-hughes
http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/history.html
http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld/wp/?p=438
http://www.frankperry.co.uk/Cymatics.htm
http://www.gwrando.org/FindingRhayader.html
http://www.unz.org/Pub/Century-1891may-00037
http://timberwolfhq.com/cymatics-sacred-geometry-dna/
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zMXwMgEACAAJ&dq=Margaret+Watts-Hughes&hl=en&sa=X&ei=I8gkUq2cLuP17AbuqoCQDQ&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAA

Benton-C Bainbridge

Another great one from Benton-C Bainbridge from the TRIGGERS series of analog synthesized audiovisual videos. For David Last.

The Incredible Machine (1968)

Some nice early vector stuff and computer generated visuals in here

Includes some things from Stan Vanderbeck & Ken Knowlton

Live Shots

Here are a few live shots from resent things, processes and events as detailed here
The audio form the performance on the 15th was on resonance fm last night and should be around somewhere on The Gravy at some point along with the audio from a whole host of amazing acts, who are also super nice people

Audio Visualisation Tests

So I have been working on a new live set up and a new more minimal aesthetic inspired by the films of the visual music pioneers and video synthesizer artists. I want to bring together the video synthesis, visual music and drawn sound worlds in to a cohesive intermedia performance. Hopefully some of this work will also find it's way in to recorded pieces. I am doing a few more live performances where I will be testing some of the new work. On the 13th I'm playing at the Wreck in Camberwell doing visuals for my bro Taki's awesome band Spring Yard  and doing a full A/V Performance with Gary for The Gravy/Cinerama at Total Refreshment Centre  on the 15th.