SOUND GENERATED FROM DATA OF MOVEMENT IN SPACE

A FIRST EXPERIMENT

START DATE : 30/10/2019 | END DATE : 30/11/2019

PLACE : TUC / NGALLERY

Nicoleta Chatzopoulou, Christos Baknis, Prof. Panagiotis Parthenios

A first experiment to establish a relationship between basic parameters of space and sound, as part of my PhD research in architecture and music composition with the help of undergraduate student Christos Baknis and under the guidance of supervisor Prof. Panagiotis Parthenios.  The main objective of this simple experiment was to extract spatial data from a cursor moving along different shapes in 2D space in the form of x-y coordinates, and to map them to a parameter of sound.  The x and y coordinates of each point are thought of as wavelengths through which the corresponding frequency can be calculated, allowing the generation of a sound, consisting of two frequencies (harmonics), per step.  Mathematica was used to plot the data and synthesise these sounds. After using the data from movement in space along two different shapes to produce sound, it is concluded that this method can prove useful for sound synthesis based on sinusoids originating from spatial data. Also, the sonic output provides clearly a sense of directionality of movement in the case of the well defined shape, ie. rectangle.  Further experimentation might be used to improve this method in order to have more diverse, interesting and “dissonant” sonic outcomes and to deal with the interesting concept of spatial scales with regards to different sound syntheses methods and tuning.