Elements
Until August 31
Some of us may have seen it in Disney's 1940 classic Fantasia as 'The Soundtrack' but most are likely to have come across sound visualisation when playing music with a media player. Computer technology has made it possible for us to 'see sound'.
American artists Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman have taken this concept further by making sound visually interactive. Their installation piece Messa di Voce, which is on show at Elements shopping mall, shows how different vocal sounds and pitches can generate images and animations in different shapes and sizes and how you can interact with these visual projections.
'We thought if we could see a voice, what would it look like? And then you have so many different kinds of voices ... that was the starting point,' says multimedia artist Rui Pereira, who installed the work. 'This installation is about sound, it's visual but most of it is interaction.'
The idea of Messa di Voce was first conceived in 2003 when Levin and Lieberman decided to take speech visualisation to a new level of sophistication. The challenge for them, as artist-engineers, was to create interactive systems that could be 'deeply instrumental for the vocalists and commensurately expressive'. They teamed up with Joan La Barbara and Jaap Blonk - best known for their experimental vocal techniques - for a performance that explored themes including abstract communication and cartoon language by using a playful audiovisual narrative.
The set-up for that performance is on display at Elements: a combination of computer vision techniques that can track the locations of the performers' heads as well as estimate the positions of their bodies. The computer also captures the audio signals coming from the performers' microphones and the 'visualisation' of different pitches and sounds are projected on a big screen behind.