VIDEO CIRCUITS: cymatics

Saturday, 5 April 2014

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

Monday, 2 September 2013

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.