Visualizing Sound

Last week, we held a channel walkthrough event with artists Travess Smalley and Daniel Lefcourt on the theme of graphic notation and visualizing sound. Travess took us through his channel Visualizing Sound: Tools, Notations, Drawings, Graphics, and Paintings and Daniel through his called Graphic Traces. Both are long standing channels (the first blocks in each date back six years) and incredible resources, filled with different examples of how artists, musicians, choreographers, and educators over the decades have translated sound and music into visual language. Because of the nature of Daniel and Travess’s own work, they’re both interested in how these examples of graphic notation relate to things like generative systems, scripts, rule based images, and the relationship between code and image. 

Daniel is a painter who engages the discipline of painting through the lens of scientific, industrial and military imaging technologies. He teaches at RISD. Travess works with computation to make generative image systems, creating painting software, computer graphics, digital images, books, drawings, and his Pixel Rugs. He teaches at The University of Rhode Island. I asked them to do the walkthrough together because they’re friends and their interests (and these channels) overlap quite a bit. We got together shortly before the event to talk about sound and graphic notation; how they use it to teach design, abstraction, and generative art; and how they use Are.na more generally.

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Meg Miller: You both had mentioned that you use these channels in your classes — I believe Travess you use it for your Foundations courses, and Daniel for your design and computation students. What kinds of things do you want to introduce to your students through these examples of graphic notation?

Travess Smalley: In these channels, we're emphasizing people who've figured out really interesting ways to visualize sounds in the past. Think about the Chladni plate, where someone has a bow and they rub it on a piece of metal, and it makes patterns depending on the frequency of the sound. Or think of the reverberation of something on a plate of oil that then makes different textures and patterns.

The last unit for my Foundations classes is a kind of summation of thinking about using systems to build work. Students have to come up with different types of iterative processes to get to this place, and we've been looking at examples all semester that kind of gear towards that. Sound doesn't inherently have a visual component, and so there’s a rich history of people trying to communicate it visually to other people, be it through color, form, sequence, or line. These are all elements that we’ve already talked about earlier in the semester, so this unit becomes a place to try it out. For some students, it becomes a place of innovation and tool-making, too. Like, how do you record sound? 

There’s also this whole idea that it leads into creative coding and computational-based work, which is all about notation. I touch on that a little bit in the Foundations classes, but these examples also become part of another class I teach called Programming Images, which is more about generative systems for image-making.

Daniel Lefcourt: Right now I’m teaching a first year design course and an upper level and graduate course called Generative Systems. I refer to this channel in both of the classes. With the first year students their final project is very open, but it's basically that you have to create a project that's based on a set of rules — these can be written down like instructions — and it has to use some element of chance. A lot of these images or references in the channel use both of those things.

The other challenge of teaching at RISD is that it's hard to teach about abstraction. Anytime you try to teach about abstraction, it automatically becomes design, which I think is a separate thing [laughs]. So how do you make that distinction? I would say the default mode of abstraction is a kind of lyrical, expressive, compositional type of abstraction — balance, dynamics, etc. So this channel provides a set of references for another way of thinking about abstraction that's not based on taste or relatively subjective decision making. How do you create a system that will generate abstract designs that don’t come from personal idiosyncrasy?

Travess: I had never thought about this as a kind of backdoor way of talking about abstraction, but I think it's a really good point. There's no second guessing it, because everyone is making their own system here. And they are formal, right? There are formal components to it. But it’s just a whole different set of criteria for thinking about it.

Daniel: And you can still deploy taste and subjectivity within it — within the individual components of a system. But ultimately the conversations come back to method: What is the structure of your system, or way of portraying music or sound?

Meg: How do these collections and these references — and just this general interest in graphic/abstract notation — show up in your own artwork and ways of making?

Travess: For me it’s this idea of building scripts and systems that you can iterate through and perform. One big thing that happened back in 2017, for my exhibition at Foxy Production, was that I had all these paintings, they were brush paintings on paper. Daniel was watching me make them the whole time. I had been coding on a computer and I was like, I don't want the computer to run my program. I want to run the program that I wrote. And so it was a script, but it was a script done by hand instead of a script done by the computer. 

While I was doing those every day, I started to think about creating as performance. I was thinking about the idea of a musician who performs the same song over and over again, and how there are subtle changes in that performance. It became a way of broadening the scope of what the actual artwork is — it might not be an individual output or an individual performance, it might be this script. It might be this document of how to make it, or how you’re going to sequence it.

Daniel: It's funny how your descriptions flow between the pragmatic instruction of how to make something to the basis of creating something. The way you described it, it's like a soccer field or something, and inside that you're doing these playful improvisations.

Travess: I like that a lot [laughs]. How about for your practice? You're probably the first artist I knew personally who was doing large plotter work, for instance, where you're using Grasshopper and painting on canvas, all of which has a very specific script to it.

One of the great things about visualizing sound is how many of the elements and principles of design you cover in an assignment like that — rhythm and repetition and stroke. I think about those computational paintings that you were making and the kind of rhythms that were at play, or the chance operations at play.

Daniel: I came at the generative stuff from the painting side, and then I became more and more interested in systematizing. But the plotter work was really inspired by two artists who are in the channel. Hanne Darboven was a big inspiration for the plotter work, and what’s interesting about her is that she kind of turns herself into a machine or a rule based system. Talk about follow-through on the rules — she sets up a system and then just executes for the rest of her life [laughs]. It’s all about the minute differences in each line as well and that humanness coming through her total machine-based way of being in the world.

Then there are these [Iannis] Xenakis scripts. And these scores were early, and were kind of the birth of generative thinking in some ways. Instead of music as notes, which have individual meanings, now you have sounds that get louder or softer or more chaotic or more narrow. So I started thinking about painting like that. I started to think about painting as not having meaning in the gesture, but as louder and softer, very material based, very formal.

Meg: That also makes me think of translation, and the different methods of translation: a more literal, one to one translation where you’re matching a word in one language to its translated word in another. And then what’s called a “sense-to-sense” translation, where you’re trying to capture more of a feeling and overall meaning, rather than being too concerned about fealty to the original wording. These examples of graphic notation are interesting because they are literally attempting to translate something from one sense to another — from hearing to sight. So all you can do is attempt to capture the feeling, and in some ways I think it‘s that attempt that is so visually interesting, and why this topic kind of immediately appeals to so many people. 

Travess: Yeah I completely agree with that. It could be poetic, it could be very straightforwardly trying to communicate something. You have some people who end up completely building their own drawing system. There’s this one person that we both have in our channels, John De Cesare. He’s in the Cooper Hewitt collection, and he did these transcriptions/scores for Wagner and for Ave Maria, where the music became very much a system for thinking about drawing and composition. For him, the communicating aspect seems less important.

Daniel: Another reason graphic notation might be so appealing, especially right now, is because of the input/output aspect. Thinking about output is so important to creative people in general right now, since we make so many things sitting at our laptops. And it’s kind of anxiety-producing, right? That there’s this separation between making things and how they will exist in the world. What’s the appropriate form that this thing should take? Looking back at these older systems of thinking about input and output can provide some inspiration or some answers.

Meg: The examples you collected in these channels are so good, and sort of stretch across time and all of these different mediums and artistic movements. I’m always curious what this kind of collecting does for thinking through a topic. What have you learned, or how has your thinking or making changed through the course of accumulating all of these references?

Daniel: Right now I’m making a bookshelf in my living room, and so I’m thinking a lot about, like, why is this so important to me? Why not just leave them in the boxes, you know? [laughs]. But there’s something to the idea of seeing all of the spines of my books lined up next to each other that can be really inspiring — to keep yourself fresh and remind yourself of what inspires you in the world. That’s kind of how I think about Are.na channels, and this channel in particular—as the spines of books. I’m not an expert on visualizing sound or graphic notation, I don’t know much deeper than the spines. But it’s inspiring to see these examples collected in one place. 

Travess: For me, the real answer is that I outsource a lot of brain power to Are.na for remembering things. I build channels to help me keep track of things, be it music, be it ideas around artwork. The show that I just did, CRAWL, would not have happened without Are.na. I used it to research game designers and algorithms for generating worlds, and there’s this whole genre of worldmaking channels on Are.na too. There were so many paths that helped give it shape.

But for these channels in particular, or for my Programming Images channel or more computational, generative systems-based channels — for me, it helps me feel like I'm part of a larger group that has been thinking about these things, or have had similar thoughts in the past. It shows me that there’s a history to all these things that I love that I can connect to what I’m doing.

Recently I got to go to this generative art conference in Berlin, and the coolest part about it was that there were these artists who were doing this in the ’60s and ’70s there. These people have been excited about these same kinds of ideas and ways of making for 50 years. And what these channels show is that it goes back even further than that. In the channel, there’s this Lumia art that was made in the 1920s, where you would play a Clavilux, a keyboard that had lights and foil inside of it, so that it would project shapes onto a really large screen. It was this kind of generative light show for audiences of several hundreds of people. I found that when I was looking up the history of expanded cinema and phantasmagoria, which lead to the history of digital animation, generative systems, and screensavers. But it also relates to performance and visualizations of sound, which were happening in these venues as far back as the ’20s. So collecting these works builds a kind of web, and it makes me feel less alone in what I’m doing.