Sound bites

In the project that forms the site of this creative, practice-led thesis, personal audio recordings are translated into intimate physical experiences. In so doing, the potential of visual music and second order cybernetics are used to develop a new experience that synthesises sound and visual components into material form. In this “aesthetically potent environment” (Pask, 1971, p. 76), the research engages with sound visualisation, sampling methods, and generative design practice. The idea explored in the thesis is that objects are continuously changing processes in time. Through parallel iterations of sound recordings, sound spectrum analysis, generative model making, and materialising methods, temporarily intimate representations of the world around me surface and are re-composed. Emerging design work implies a semiotic polyvalence that is realised through a process of techno-transformative and generative methods. As such, new arrangements are created, comprising single parts that are restructured into rhythmic patterns. The individual samples do not act as quotes; instead they operate as generative material for systemic combination. This design acts as a provocation; its purpose is to trigger an audience to consider the potentials of personally significant sound as a form of unique, material user experience. 1. Visual music is a means of converting music to images using a system or set of rules that can be implemented as a machine or computer code (Friedlander, 1998, para. 8). 2. Second Order Cybernetics refers to the cybernetics of observing systems (Foerster, 1975). In this paradigm there is no longer a separation of the goal and system from the observer (Glanville, 2004)