Angles: Vision and Sound

The components of an angle

The angle, or the shape made at the conjunction of two straight lines gives us the letter 'V' and the letter 'L'. I have looked at angles before under their collective title of the zig-zag, and in their classic formal three line arrangement as the triangle but as they have such a vital role to play in our understanding of visual communication, I thought it time to look at them on their own. 'At a tight angle' suggests something hard to get at, a right angle is regarded as something upright and 'true'; not only have angles influenced he way we think visually, they have penetrated our verbal languages as well. An angle suggests an approach, as in 'what angle are you taking' and when we encounter a steep angle on road signs, whether it is going up or down, the approach is always from the left.

Angles can be harsh, the angle of naked pain was an angle that we used to ask Foundation students to find and draw when we were advocating working on that edge between logic and nonsense; 'l'angle mort', is the common French term for the "blind spot" that you often find involved in traffic accidents. 

However it is in pictorial composition that we find the angle most often used in visual languages. 

Charles Henry: Aesthetic Protractor 

Mathematical harmony based on certain divine proportions is an old concept but it was revived in the 19th century by Charles Henry, the French “psychobiophysicist”. In 1888 he published a colour circle and an associated aesthetic protractor, so that artists could decide on colour selection based on Henry's psychophysiological principles of dynamogeny and inhibition. A theory of rhythm was also added by Henry related to prime numbers or their reciprocal fractions. I have highlighted before in posts on 19th century approaches to visualising invisible forces, that these now 'discredited theories', had an impact on artists and how they went about their trade and in doing so they left a legacy of thinking that still lingers around the edges of Modernism. 

In visual perception, it has been argued that angles not only convey information, but that they also produce emotional responses. In the 17th century Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) developed an inventory of 24 emotions in his 'Expressions of the Passions of the Soul'.  

Charles Le Brun: Surprise and Admiration

He wanted trainee painters who belonged to the French royal academy to more precisely describe emotions and this inventory of expressions has been central to the reproduction of facial emotions in visual images ever since. However, in the late 19th century Georges Seurat who had received French royal academy training, had become aware of the emergence of physiological optics, and it became increasingly clear to him that perception was not a matter of a passive reception of a fixed image, but that there was a dynamic interrelationship between image and observer, that together contributed to the making of emotional perception. Charles Henry's physiological research into visual perception was focused on  concepts of dynamogeny and inhibition or as Edouard Brown-Sequard (1817-1894) described them, 'the transformation or displacement of forces'. (Crary, 2001, p.164). This very closely relates to my own interests in how artists might visualise invisible energies and although Brown-Sequard's and other's ideas of invisible forces and their actions during this time period are now discredited, I still feel that there is something about them that needs exploring, even if only the need to give balance with current scientific theories, which I am sure will be overturned in the next half of this century as new approaches are taken in our attempts to understand the invisible energies that surround us. 

Charles Henry proposed that angles could stimulate the perception of emotion. For instance by using angles of 24, 30, 45, 60 and 72 degrees he stated dynamogenic effects would be aroused that represented an energetic and joyful atmosphere. (Smith, 1997, p.143). If you for instance use a Dutch angle in photography, which is about 20 degrees, you take the image off its vertical, or right angled stability and in doing so create a certain emotional unease.  

Creating a sense of unease in a photograph

In this case 'Dutch' isn't Dutch, as the name is a corruption of Deutsch, (German) and it came about because of the consistent use of angled shots on German expressionist films. By avoiding the stability of the right angled vertical it feels as if reality has been knocked off its axis. 

Typical German expressionist film scene

Scene flipped horizontally 

German expressionist cinema employed several scene builders who had backgrounds in painting and they were very aware of how angle effected emotion. By simply flipping the image above, it is interesting to see how an angle rising from the left changes our feeling tone as we sense that we in this case have to climb the street off balance as apposed to an angle falling down the street from the left, whereby we feel in even greater danger, the danger of falling off the edge. 

Henry had looked at the earlier work of Humbert de Superville who had his own three line scheme for expression; 'expansive, horizontal, and convergent', a scheme that he believed affected the fundamental emotions. These were based on facial expressions, rising diagonals signifying a smile, convergent diagonals indicating sadness.

I personally thought de Superville's work very superficial in comparison with Le Brun's, but Seurat was impressed enough to try and use the angles proposed by Henry in several of his later paintings, such as the Circus.

Le Brun's facial expressions

De Superville had like Le Brun before him, based his ideas on studies of classical art, and he praised the Apollo Belvedere as embodying the mystery of art, studying the sculpture from several angles, and illustrating his lectures with drawings meant to demonstrate the ideal proportions of the statue.

Humbert de Superville: Sketch of the Apollo Belvedere

De Superville: The intrinsic meaning of shapes colours and lines

Kandinsky: Colour shape questionnaire

It is Kandinsky that brings this discussion into the 20th century. He had very clear views as to which colours fitted which angles. A sharp angle, such as one at 30% is he stated an aggressive angle, and best matches the colour yellow. A straight upright right angle of 90˚ is red. As the angle opens out it turns bluer as it has less aggression, and eventually at 180 degrees the right colour becomes a black horizontal line. He even put out colour/shape questionnaires to test his theory, if you got it right, the triangle would be yellow, the square red and the circle blue. Kandinsky, like Mondrian was interested in Theosophy a movement that was a complex belief system, which included a belief that colours affected spiritual harmony. 

Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright, founders of the Synchromism movement were also influenced by Theosophy, and they developed colour and keyboard relationship diagrams. They were also testing out other theories, such as those associated with the concept of 'elan vital' and as you can see in the title of the image below, colour composition and life forces were in 1914, as in Theosophy, entangled. 

Morgan Russell: 

'Synchromy in Orange: the creation of man conceived as a result of a natural generative force' 1914

As Russell developed his Eidos and his ideas for a light machine, Macdonald-Wright, then living in California, was equally preoccupied with developing a kinetic light machine and nurtured an accompanying interest in film and theatre. In 1927, he began working with a theatrical group in Santa Monica and called his work "Synchromist Theater." The Christian Science Monitor described how "the action of the play takes place in nowhere, at no time, therefore to have other than a purely abstract setting would not only be incongruous but ridiculous. The mood induced by the use of these Synchromist settings is definite, and together with the use of Wright's color organ, which can throw any or all of the colors of the spectrum...evoke an illusion and atmosphere of a fresh sort." He successfully built what he called a Synchrome Kaleidoscope in 1959 and this as an idea would help others in the search for a synthesis between the emotional languages of sound and light. 

Wolfgang Köhler had in 1929 developed what he called the bouba/kiki effect and this pointed to another way of developing sound symbolism within visual languages.

Kiki and Bouba shapes

It was discovered that right across the world if you showed these two shapes above to people and asked them which is Kiki and which is Bouba, virtually everybody pointed to the sharp angled image as 'Kiki' and the rounded curved image as 'Bouba'. By the time I entered into this sound / image conundrum it was late in the day, but still there was a lot to learn. In the mid to late 1970s I was teaching on the foundation course in art and design at Leeds. It was a course that had its roots in Bauhaus thinking and exercises using sound and vision were often used with students to make them aware of the possibilities of sound and vision interaction. One thing as staff we would do was to 'sound' a drawing. I used to enjoy the intuitive responses to shape and colour this would engender. Making vocalised sounds and varying their pitch as students presented various shapes and surfaces for critique. The structure of Steve Reich's 'Come Out' often being used as an example of how overlaying and serial repetition could give rise to visual as well as aural compositions. 

However by the 1970s a new way of thinking about these issues was coming in to play. Because of the introduction of computers, programmers began getting interested in algorithms, and they began to see that these could be used to predict things or give shape to possibilities. One of the earliest attempts at this was Stiny and Gips' 'shape grammar'. 

From 'shape grammar' by Stiny and Gips (1978)

Stiny and Gips proposed in 1971 that by using their algorithms sets of non representational, geometric art could be generated. Aesthetics as a concept was boiled down and considered in terms of 'specificational simplicity and visual complexity'. But things have changed, and aesthetics linked to algorithmic possibilities has developed far beyond the simple idea of this being a way to create variations of abstract images. By using 'like' as an information gathering tool, this social media practice has allowed companies to see in almost real time how virtually anything, can be used to influence audiences' emotions, not just shape and colour. Kandinsky's colour shape questionnaire looks so naive in comparison. 

Grasses drawn by a computer using L-systems

At the same time that Stiny and Gips were developing algorithms that could generate geometric forms, Aristid Lindenmayer was devising 'L'-systems to describe the behaviour of plant cells and to model the growth processes of plant development. The angle was now part of a decision making process that was becoming more and more embedded into computer software development, one that was eventually to lead to uses within the growing field of artificial intelligence. As computers were able to crunch bigger and bigger number sets, more and more complex behaviours could be modelled, perhaps the most significant of these early models being 'Boids' an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulated the flocking behaviour of birds.

Boids

Boids as a way of visualising complex flows of information would eventually be used to visualise how a virus might spread. You can probably see where all this is going, but one development in particular went right back to that association Kandinsky and other artists had made between colour, shape and sound and this development is something you see as soon as you open a sound recording or editing program on your computer, it will show the peaks and troughs of the sound you are dealing with, using oscilloscope and similar sound visualiser systems. 

Oskar Fischinger with a “sound scroll” used in the optical soundtrack of one of his films.

Oskar Fischinger was an early pioneer of abstract film and for his soundtracks he developed visual scrolls, the language of which as you can see from the example above was developed from the idea of repeated angles or triangular divisions of time and space. While Fischinger drew each individual waveform by hand, the animator Norman McLaren, developed template based methods to do the same thing. Eventually coming up with the idea of index cards, each painted with a pattern whose spacings produced notes in the chromatic scale. The idea of an optical soundtrack seems quite complex but it could at the time be very easily constructed.

The sound artist would take a strip of black film, or film with a black soundtrack area, two or three feet long. Make a single scratch on it, join the film into a loop and run it on a moviola or projector. The scratch would give a click with a certain quality. The splice in the loop would also make a click. but you need to discount that. The next step was to take the loop off the projector and make another type of scratch with a different size and shape, at least 4, 6 or 8 frames away from the first scratch. Then you would run the loop again, and you would hear two clicks, each with a different quality; one may have a hard sound and the other a soft sound, or one may be loud and the other quiet, by adding various types of scratches one by one, and by identifying them, the artist would learn what kind of scratch gives what kind of sound. By doing this a direct link between sound and vision was made. The story of these events is told in detail in an article by Golan Levin 'Painterly Interfaces for Audiovisual Performance', and what interested me was when computer real time visualisations became possible, such as in Pete Rice’s work, how similar the forms generated were to the ones visualised as 'thought forms' by Besant and Leadbeater back in the early 20th century.

Stretchable music

A screen capture from Pete Rice’s Stretchable Music system in use

Charles Webster Leadbeater & Annie Besant 'Thought Forms 1905

By moving backwards and forwards in time what we can do is sense the physical reality that underpins the seeming 'magic' of current computer realisations. For myself this makes things more graspable and I can see these things as material languages again. As a student of fine art, you may feel that computer aided art is not for you, but the fact is that everything is grounded in the interconnectedness of everything else and that by unravelling the threads that tie it all together, an artist can begin to both play with and open out the situation for new and hopefully fascinating re-interpretations and avenues for material thinking. 

Recording of the sounds in Hyde Park London

During the Covid pandemic MIT’s Senseable City Lab looked at park environments in five cities – San Francisco, New York, London, Milan, and Singapore. It was an attempt to see how collective sound environments were changing due to the fact that people were altering their patterns of behaviour. The project simply accepts that there is a direct relationship between sound and vision, but I think it misses an artist's involvement, one that could have been used to create a more physical response to what was happening. 

Lines: Anders Lind 

'Lines' by Anders Lind, reminds us of how musical notations rely on the use of visual lines to make sense of them, thus closing the loop between lines as abstract forms and sound as an abstract language. The fact that you have to physically engage with the piece means that you begin to know this in your body and not just in your mind. 

Signs of a sound emerging from our mouths also often use angles, the sign below is a stock image for a shout, we imagine the angles emerging from the mouth as an indicator of the loudness of the shout.

References:

Crary, J. (2001). Suspension of Perception : Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Levin, G (1994) Painterly Interfaces for Audiovisual Performance Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Moritz, W. (1986) Abstract Film and Colour Music, in: The Spiritual in Art, Abstract Painting 1890 – 1985 New York: Abbeville Press, 

Smith, P. (1997). Seurat and the Avant-garde. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Stiny, G., & Gips, J. (1971). Shape Grammars and the Generative Specification of Painting and Sculpture. IFIP Congress.

See also:

The zig-zag

The triangle

Eye music

Drawing sound

Steve Reich Rhythm and colour constructions