.

 

Seeing Sound/Synthesis

I was losing my mind thinking about sine waves.

Seeing Sound/Synthesis

I built a simple oscilloscope, tearing up an old computer monitor and using my stereo to control the horizontal and vertical. A clean orange line sketches out wobbly sound waves.

Clear bass notes become large fringed ovals, snare drums transform into messy, blurred tangles. With a synthesizer, I can make interlaced, moving spiderlegs dance with each other. Shaded circles, riding other circles, curl into a moving, musical spirograph.

Complicated, arranged music looks like it sounds--twisted together, jiggling, and alive. To see the shapes within requires filters to split up the sound. Pure, nasal electronic tones work best, showing up as perfect aural geometries. They also sound the worst. When one voice sings, or one instrument plays, you can see the character of the tones, the edges in the timbre of a violin or the rich circles of the trombone, but you also see the character of the musician. My friend's singing voice shows more curves than my voice. The bass in my voice makes the image larger. When we sing together, the shapes melt and merge; the more accurate the harmonies, the less the image shivers.

Spending so much time seeing sound, the metaphors creep into the rest of my life. My months and days are waves of emotions. When they interact with the waves of other people, they harmonize or dissonate. I filter frequencies out of certain waves and allow others to resonate. I'm even planning a musical composition where I graph my moods on a scale, for one year, and use those graphs as sound waves that make up instruments.

In my life, I aim for a low frequency and moderate amplitude. The low frequency comes out as a comforting bass, one oscillation every eighty thousand heartbeats. Things happen, but not too quickly. Amplitude, or volume, stays low. Every peak, every cycle of sound, has an opposite in a valley, and one foreshadows the other. To make too much noise means great highs and deep lows. Boring as it might be, I'll take the calm and steady, instead, even if other people can't always hear me.


[Top]

Ftrain.com

PEEK

Ftrain.com is the website of Paul Ford and his pseudonyms. It is showing its age. I'm rewriting the code but it's taking some time.

FACEBOOK

There is a Facebook group.

TWITTER

You will regret following me on Twitter here.

EMAIL

Enter your email address:

A TinyLetter Email Newsletter

About the author: I've been running this website from 1997. For a living I write stories and essays, program computers, edit things, and help people launch online publications. (LinkedIn). I wrote a novel. I was an editor at Harper's Magazine for five years; then I was a Contributing Editor; now I am a free agent. I was also on NPR's All Things Considered for a while. I still write for The Morning News, and some other places.

If you have any questions for me, I am very accessible by email. You can email me at ford@ftrain.com and ask me things and I will try to answer. Especially if you want to clarify something or write something critical. I am glad to clarify things so that you can disagree more effectively.

POKE


Syndicate: RSS1.0, RSS2.0
Links: RSS1.0, RSS2.0

Contact

© 1974-2011 Paul Ford

Recent

@20, by Paul Ford. Not any kind of eulogy, thanks. And no header image, either. (October 15)

Recent Offsite Work: Code and Prose. As a hobby I write. (January 14)

Rotary Dial. (August 21)

10 Timeframes. (June 20)

Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out. (April 10)

Why I Am Leaving the People of the Red Valley. (April 7)

Welcome to the Company. (September 21)

“Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?”. Forgot to tell you about this. (July 20)

“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. An essay for TheMorningNews.org. (July 11)

Woods+. People call me a lot and say: What is this new thing? You're a nerd. Explain it immediately. (July 10)

Reading Tonight. Reading! (May 25)

Recorded Entertainment #2, by Paul Ford. (May 18)

Recorded Entertainment #1, by Paul Ford. (May 17)

Nanolaw with Daughter. Why privacy mattered. (May 16)

0h30m w/Photoshop, by Paul Ford. It's immediately clear to me now that I'm writing again that I need to come up with some new forms in order to have fun here—so that I can get a rhythm and know what I'm doing. One thing that works for me are time limits; pencils up, pencils down. So: Fridays, write for 30 minutes; edit for 20 minutes max; and go whip up some images if necessary, like the big crappy hand below that's all meaningful and evocative because it's retro and zoomed-in. Post it, and leave it alone. Can I do that every Friday? Yes! Will I? Maybe! But I crave that simple continuity. For today, for absolutely no reason other than that it came unbidden into my brain, the subject will be Photoshop. (Do we have a process? We have a process. It is 11:39 and...) (May 13)

That Shaggy Feeling. Soon, orphans. (May 12)

Antilunchism, by Paul Ford. Snack trams. (May 11)

Tickler File Forever, by Paul Ford. I'll have no one to blame but future me. (May 10)

Time's Inverted Index, by Paul Ford. (1) When robots write history we can get in trouble with our past selves. (2) Search-generated, "false" chrestomathies and the historical fallacy. (May 9)

Bantha Tracks. (May 5)

More...
Tables of Contents