#Background patterns soundwaves series#

The result looked “ like a puffer fish or an alien or something it’s got all these crazy lines in it. One of his favorites is the image for F sharp, which is “kind of a weird sound,” he says.

#Background patterns soundwaves series#

“It’s the first time we’ve done a series of work where we didn’t know what the end result was going to look like,” he says. Louviere says he was surprised by some of the patterns they produced. They chose the images with the most complex or aesthetically pleasing patterns. “It was just constant shooting, and trying like every frequency we could stand,” Louviere says.īrown took about 2,000 photographs in total, and the duo narrowed those down to a dozen, based on the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. A bright ring light mounted over the box illuminated the water below.Īs Louviere cycled through musical notes at different frequencies and volumes, from low to ear-piercing-“there was a point where it was so high we had to put the dogs outside so it wouldn’t hurt their ears,” he says-Brown took photographs through the ring light of the water formations produced by the vibrations. He then hooked the speaker up to an amp plugged into a frequency generator-that is, a computer program with an oscillator-that he could use to play musical notes at various frequencies. On top of the speaker, he placed a lined box and filled it with water and black food coloring. Louviere dismantled one of his guitar amps and separated the speaker, aiming it upwards. To create the images, the pair (also known as Louviere + Vanessa) built their own version of a Chladni plate in their New Orleans home. The resulting work became Resonantia (Latin for “echo”), a multimedia project centered around 12 images produced by vibrations. By spreading fine sand across the top of a metal plate and running a violin bow alongside, Chladni showed that the sand would settle into distinct patterns, depending on the frequencies of the sound waves produced by the bow.Ĭenturies later, in the 1960s, a Swiss physician named Hans Jenny built on Chladni’s experiments in an effort to study vibrational phenomena-what he called “ cymatics.” Visual artist Jeff Louviere happened upon the works of Jenny and Chladni while researching another project, and he and his partner, photographer Vanessa Brown, became inspired to conduct their own experiments to see what sound could look like. In the late 18 th century, German physicist and musician Ernst Chladni demonstrated how vibrations could be used to create striking imagery.