How does sound look like? How can you make it visible? These were the two questions, that I tried to answer with this project.
Physically speaking, sound is always a vibration, whether it is the song of a nightingale, the sound of a piano or the human voice. It moves in waves, by the compression and rarefaction of the air molecules. Once the wave reaches our ear, our brain transforms it back into a noise, a melody etc.
Now, I was thinking, how can I turn this audible signal, the wave, into a visual signal. I came up with a very simple, yet effective method: I mounted a thin plastic foil on top of the membrane of a common loud speaker. I then added hundreds of colorful, tiny crystals onto the foil. Every time now that I would play a sound through the speaker, the vibration caused by that sound will make the crystals to jump up and down, forming into these peculiar looking forms and figures you see in the images. Depending on the frequency, pitch and volume of the tone, the figures change their appearance. So now, the audible signal, the sound wave, has transformed into a visual signal, the shapes you see on the images of „Dancing Colors“…sound has become visible.