From April 6, 2012 – May 7, 2012, the College of Charleston Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library hosted the exhibit “Visual Soundscapes” which was comprised of work from students enrolled in Computing in the Arts (CITA) courses. Student artists were part of the Fall 2011 “Computer Music and the Quest for Beauty” Freshman Learning Community.
The students selected an image and then designed a set of musical parameters through which these images could be realized in sound. Musical parameters included pitch and scale, dynamics, timbre, and instrumentation. Inspiration and models were drawn from musical traditions such as Minimalism, Jazz, Rock, Serialism, and Aleatory Music. Students were free to select different parts of the image for specific musical functions. Not all parts of the images were necessarily sonified, yet most of the sound comes from numeric data (pixels) inside these images. Changes in sound reflect a scanning of the image from left-to-right, up-to-down, center-to-corners, or diagonally. Sometimes sound comes from averaged regions of the image, and at other times complex sequencing rules are used, like those found in Living Systems.
The following images are from a reception hosted for the student artists. Enjoy!
Students: Caroline Bowman Daniel Anderson Marissa Croop Jordan Freeman Sam McCants Forrest Hammond Kenneth Hanson Hudson Jones Elizabeth Koury Katherine May Stephen Rainey John Thevos Dylan Walsh
Faculty: Bill Manaris, Computer Science Blake Stevens, Music Jarod Charzewski, Studio Art (Exhibition Coordinator)
Thanks To: Claire Fund, Administrative Coordinator, Addlestone Library Susan Kattwinkel, Director of the First-Year-Experience (Fall 2011) James Williams, Associate Dean, Addlestone Library
Credits: This work has been funded in part by the National Science Foundation (DUE #1044861)
Computing in the Arts (CITA): Computing in the Arts (CITA) is an integrated program in the sciences and the arts at the College of Charleston. The program is an inter-disciplinary B.A. degree offered by the Department of Computer Science in the School of Science and Mathematics along with the Departments of Art History, Music, Studio Art, and Theatre in the School of the Arts.
