German Artist Creates “Sound Art” Video from Ordinary Noise

German artist Rainer Tautenhahn has invented a new art form: Sound Art. It's a computer system that listens to ordinary everyday noises and converts it into vibrant colorful moving images displayed on a screen. The Sun describes the result as a way to listen to your world while Mail Onlinesays it provides a means of converting emotional sounds to works of art that move the onlooker in multi-dimensional ways. Examples of his work can be seen in a video he has posted on YouTube.

The idea is based, the Sun says, on the idea that sounds are part of our everyday lives, but only a small subset of them hold much meaning. The sound of a child crying for example, or a cat purring. Each causes certain emotions to arise in those near enough to hear. What Tautenhahn does, Onlinesays, is capture the essence of that sound, send it through special software he's written and then displays its emotional equivalent. It's a way of seeing an emotion, he told the Sun, in a new and emotional way.

Capturing noise and converting it to dancing lights isn't new of course, there have been devices for sale for years that do just that, offering up light shows that dance in time to music for example. But those are all preprogrammed and can only show a limited number of patterns. In contrast, the new system Tautenhahn has put together is capable of creating an infinite variety of images because each is based on the unique characteristics of any given sound. If two different baby cries are recorded, two entirely different types of display will be produced. This is because, the Sun says, the software takes into account not just tone and volume, but pitch, silent parts, and the frequency of its wave pattern. These are all elements are brains pick up on naturally, alerting us to the subtle differences in tone when people ask us questions to very quickly pick up on the mood state of the person doing the asking.

Tautenhahn told the Sun that he did preprogram suggestions for colors to suit various moods, but he also added factors that can cause subtle changes to them, allowing for sad sounds to be represented by dark reds, purples and even black, rather than the standard blue. The result, Online says, is a startling display of stark emotionalism that has to be seen in person to truly understand.

The first crying baby

The sound of machine Harley

The sound of coins

 

The sound avalanche

The sound of waves and birds in Seychelles

The sound of the words "Hi I'm Brian May '

Buddhist monk laughs four times

The sound of a cat wandering around the house