Drawing sound: Spectrograms, vibration and religion

A visualisation of the word 'heard' spoken by an Australian English speaking male.

Everyone remembers that moment when the teacher's chalk made an awful screech as it was drawn across the blackboard. It just for a moment resonated with the board and produced a sound that went up under your fingernails and hit some spot in the back of your head and hurt you. Those moments are important to recall because they remind us of how sound and the body are inseparable, just as light directly affects us, sound and its vibrations tune us into the rest of the world. Sometimes a sound will cause the hairs to stand up on the back of your neck, the latin word 'horreo', from which we derive the word 'horror', used to mean to dread, shudder or bristle. Adorno states in his Aesthetic Theory, that the first sign of the world having an emotional effect upon us is goosebumps and it could be added when the hair stands up on the back of your neck. I.e. aesthetics begins in bodily responses. 

Visualisation of OM

Eastern religious cultures have understood this for thousands of years, and so has Western Christianity, but because Eastern religions have seen great value in a body/mind interconnection they have tended to celebrate and use this understanding to deepen a connection with the world, whilst within certain areas of Christian thought the deep sensual links made by sound were seen to be so transformative that they could distract attention away from thinking about the suffering of Christ, therefore in Church music certain sounds were forbidden. (Pope Gregory banned the use of the augmented fourth, "diabolus in musica") However because of its vibratory possibilities this particular sound was often used in Hindu musical structures and is essential to the sound structure of certain chants. For instance, the resonant chanting of 'OM' it was believed, attuned its chanters into the deep rhythm of the world itself. Timothy Morton recognises this experience as being that of 'the hyper-object', something that can 'only be detected as a ghostly spectrality that comes in and out of phase with normalised human spacetime.' (Morton, 2013, p. 169). 

Think of your breath as the air of the world being pulled into your body and then it being pushed out in such a way that your body shapes it into a vibrating pattern. This sound pattern mirrors the shape of your chest-throat-mouth and as it goes out into the world it sets up resonating vibrating patterns with all of the other objects it encounters. Like a blind man riding a bicycle and whistling, this sound locates you in the world, but also dissolves you back into it. 

Robert Morris: Box with the sound of its own making: 1961

Within the art world it was John Cage that opened out for us the importance of these things. His pupil, La Monte Young seeing the implication of Cage's teaching realised that if all things had their own resonant patterns, perhaps instead of seeing musical instruments as things humans played, they could be seen as objects that humans could interact with, and in doing so help release the possibilities inherent in their physical construction. Robert Morris had already intuited this type of idea with 'A box with the sound of its own making', but La Monte Young took this even further with 'The well tuned piano' a piece he began in 1964 and first performed 10 years later. 

La Monte Young: 'The well tuned piano' 

Marian Zazeela often worked in collaboration with La Monte Young, she used slides of still images and coloured gels that were blended in very slow dissolves from one to the next in order to create optical effects that were designed to mirror the effects being made by La Monte's sounds. 

Marian Zazeela: Untitled 1967

Dream House: Young and Zazeela

Young and Zazeela were key figures in that hippy movement that sought to liberate us from the world of post war realities and at the time in the 1960s they seemed to offer a much more spiritual response to the growing spectre of consumerism than 'Pop Art' and the mirroring of consumerist products that it was offering. However, unfortunately, (in my mind) it was 'Pop Art', Andy Warhol and his progeny Jeff Koons, that went on to dominate the future concerns of the art world. Warhol was easy to 'get' and spiritual concerns worked directly against the might of the capitalist project.

Consumerism has by now become the dominant factor in society and I believe it is time to revisit work such as that done by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, especially now that digital technology is reshaping our vision of what things are and could be. In many ways new technology opens doors into areas of thinking that were not available in the 1960s, especially the way that it allows us to see sound and hear vision. We are also living in a time whereby we need to think more about how humans interact with the world and if we are to release the possibilities inherent in more sensitive interactions, we also need to remind ourselves that we ought not to be to profit from these things, but to establish our interconnectedness with the world and the wider web of life. 

In a previous post on Eye Music I looked at historical examples of artists trying to visualise sound and the book 'Thought-Forms', by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater was introduced as a key text. However since the advent of digital technologies everything that enters the digital world is convertible into anything else. After all for the computer it's all a matter of switches being in a particular pattern of ons and offs.  Translation, something we have also looked at before, is done all the time because of the nature of the medium, everything becoming a pattern of ons or offs and in the case of a visual representation of a sound we now have a wide range of differing software packages that can generate spectrograms. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of sound signals as they vary with time. Spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data is represented in 3D plotted graphs they are sometimes called waterfalls and in that simile we have a connection that reminds us that everything is interdependent and that all is movement and vibration. A form, like a waterfall when looked at closely becoming empty, emptiness when explored becoming simply gaps in the pattern. I'm told that this situation is dealt with in Buddhism by the Heart Sutra. In this sutra we are reminded that any philosophies or expositions as to the nature of the world are mere statements about reality, they are not reality itself, and that the ultimate truth is beyond mental understanding.

The Heart Sutra

Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realisation
he overcame all Ill-being.

“Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
The same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.

“Listen Sariputra,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.

“That is why in Emptiness,
Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
Mental Formations and Consciousness
are not separate self entities.

The Eighteen Realms of Phenomena
which are the six Sense Organs,
the six Sense Objects,
and the six Consciousnesses
are also not separate self entities.

The Twelve Links of Interdependent Arising
and their Extinction
are also not separate self entities.
Ill-being, the Causes of Ill-being,
the End of Ill-being, the Path,
insight and attainment,
are also not separate self entities.

Whoever can see this
no longer needs anything to attain.

Bodhisattvas who practice
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
see no more obstacles in their mind,
and because there
are no more obstacles in their mind,
they can overcome all fear,
destroy all wrong perceptions
and realize Perfect Nirvana.

“All Buddhas in the past, present and future
by practicing
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
are all capable of attaining
Authentic and Perfect Enlightenment.

“Therefore Sariputra,
it should be known that
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
is a Great Mantra,
the most illuminating mantra,
the highest mantra,
a mantra beyond compare,
the True Wisdom that has the power
to put an end to all kinds of suffering.
Therefore let us proclaim
a mantra to praise
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore.

Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!”

But we still suffer. In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T S Elliot writes; 'But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen', images of this sort remind us of how patterns can be found in everything and that life itself can be visualised as the woven thread that follows our passage through time. Prufrock was however still suffering, his nerves jangled as he he saw their pattern. As we can see, poems can be visualised, but in this translation some things are lost and others gained.

Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck im Havelland' by Theodor Fontane: re-visualised

Theodor Fontane's poem becomes a new object, its internal links revealed to suggest a new organic reality, still dependent on the original poem but a new thing in its own right that reveals a totally different series of associations never apparent in the linear narrative of the poem. Gradually text becomes vibration pattern, like the sound of many voices mixing, a hum of sound that is an essential part of being both sender and receiver. 

Words in space are now part of the data stream and the data stream threatens to reshape us as its algorithms respond to our needs and desires and begin to both feed us and shape us at the same time. If both digital and analogical drawing is seen as vibration patterning it can be seen as an area to fuse together thinking about our interconnectedness with everything, we just need to find better ways of understanding how to use both old and new drawing technologies.

Heike Weber

The work of Heike Weber in many ways harks back to the images Bridget Riley and Marian Zazeela developed during the 1960s, working in an immersive installation direction, her drawings cover floors, ceilings and walls. You can see a connection in her work with the surfaces of geometric patterns developed in Islamic art and you get a feeling that work of this sort has many more possibilities for reflecting on ideas concerning pattern and space. 

Islamic tile pattern

The sound/art genre Black Midi so called because there are so many notes in each piece that a score would look nearly black if it was set out as traditional sheet music, is an area where you can find contemporary approaches to sound/vision mixes and interestingly a lot of these results are collective, like the Islamic tile pattern a product of many minds rather than an individual. 

Black Midi selection

The internet itself can be seen as a pattern and as we enter into cyberspace, this post being one tiny vibration in this digital pattern, perhaps this is a glimpse of how in future artists may begin to visualise both electronic and spiritual realities.  

A visualisation of the Internet

Some technical information that might be useful if you are thinking of using sound visualisation techniques.

A sonic visualiser is a program that is used visualize the sound spectrum (a more detailed explanation can be found here). Additionally, there are also programs (such as Coagula and Metasynth) that allow users to easily convert any image into an audio file (you can even find a video tutorial on YouTube).

Oscilloscopes have long been used to turn sound wavelengths into graphical images and they are the precursors of spectrographs. 

Oscilloscopes used to called oscillographs because of the way they were used to visually represent varying signal voltages, they operated by providing a two-dimensional plot of one or more signals as a function of time set of against a graph.  Signals (such as sound or vibration) are converted to voltages and then displayed. 

Oscilloscope

Oscilloscopes are used to observe the change of an electrical signal over time, which can be described by a shape that is continuously graphed against a calibrated scale. The oscilloscope can be adjusted so that repetitive signals can be observed as a continuous shape on the screen. A storage oscilloscope allows single events to be captured by the instrument and displayed for a relatively long time, allowing observation of events too fast to be directly perceptible.

Special-purpose oscilloscopes may be used for such purposes as displaying the waveform of your heartbeat as an electrocardiogram, a reminder that the body is controlled by a pumping heart and that a messy wet sticky thing lies at the centre of all this technological information. 

An electrocardiogram

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/pgwbnb/a-brief-history-of-artists-turning-pictures-into-music-and-vice-versa

A link to an article on sound and healing

References


Adorno, T (2013) Aesthetic Theory London: Bloomsbury p.331

Morton, T (2013) Hyperobjects London: Minnesota Press



Sound is materially invisible but very visceral and emotive. It can define a space at the same time as it triggers a memory -Susan Philipsz


See also:

Eye Music
Jorinde Voigt Drawing as notation
Drawing and quantum theory
Drawing as translation