Musical Systems Blog

cooking show parody web mini-series

cymatic range, cymatic noodle maker, cymatic oven, kitchen television studio set, HD high-speed video camera, polyurethane foam, chef uniform, miscellaneous ingredients

Cymatics, from the Greek word κῦμα (kuma) meaning wave, is the study of modal vibrational phenomena due to sonic vibration, most commonly when this becomes visible through the interaction of a substance with a rigid environment. At its simplest level, it is the physical process of visualizing sound and this sound can come from a variety of sources including a speaker, musical instrument, vibrating plate, or membrane. Common mediums for interaction with this sound source are particles like sand and lycopodium powder or liquids such as water or a non-newtonian fluid like the colloidal mixture of water and corn starch. Symmetrical shapes and patterns emerge through the cymatic process including lines, circles, waves, ellipses and other more complex patterns that can be attributed to the vibrational nodes and anti-nodes. These patterns can have periodic patterns or change over time depending on the particular frequency and intrinsic properties of the medium and system.

Experiments with the non-Newtonian fluid expanding polyurethane foam (cymatic dough) have shown that when it is cymatically excited, food like structures are generated. Funnel cake and Asian bean cakes have been made and extending on those techniques, it is possible to create noodles, bread, and sandwiches.

Cookin’ with Cymatics turns the cooking show structure on its head by removing food, the essential element, and replacing it with inedible toxic goo. It is a commentary on pollution and the toxic chemicals and ideas we use to shape our world. The show which is the authority figure presents recipes and dishes that the audience is forced to accept at face value and replicate within their own homes and then consume. Sound is used to excite the “ingredients” and “cook” them. Music from different cultures can be used to create cultural food items. Some of the created food appears edible with the outward appearance of a delicious dish. Other cymatic dishes appear disgusting and more true to the nature of their constituent chemicals. This is analogous to how some of the chemicals we use are dangerous but invisible and never seen, blending into our everyday lives, while others are more shocking and obvious. Depending on the show theme and given recipe, ingredients range from motor oil to blood or more classic ingredients such as raw eggs, milk, meat, or the holiday classic cranberry sauce.

Cooking Apparatus Cymatic Range The Cymatic Range is a standard kitchen range with the burners replaced with large speaker cones. Dials on the range instead of controlling temperature, control the frequency and amplitude of the sound signal being used for cymatic excitation.

Cymatic Noodle Maker A reservoir with attached PVC pipe with small holes drilled in the sides. The reservoir is loaded with cymatic dough which upon expansion is forced into the pipe and extruded out through the holes. Cylindrical noodles are formed for use in Italian pasta, or Asian noodle dishes.

Cymatic Oven An aluminum pan with a bass shaker attached below it. This apparatus is placed inside a traditional oven. Ideal for bread and pizza.

The cooking show genre is very well known and formulaic, making it ripe for parody and subversion. The standard format will be followed as closely as possible. There will be a theme song and a chime sound will play after the completion of each dish accompanied by a slide of an HD shot of the created dish. This shot will appear as delicious or disgusting as possible. At times the show will cut forward to a point further in time when a dish is completed. The show will be filmed in front of a live studio audience and their reactions will be kept in the final edit when applicable.

The presence of the speakers and sound allows for great flexibility for sound excitation. Some recipes call for a sustained tone such as a 40 hz sine tone. This type of sound is the most useful for the creation of cymatic patterns but it does not carry any political or social information. Audio samples such as fascist propaganda, jihadi nasheeds, mashups, and other genres of music/sound can be used and their preparation will be an integral element of the show. The chef will begin by preparing the audio file in a DAW. This may involve pitch shifting and EQing to bring it down into a range best suited for the prescribed cymatic recipe. When a jihadi nasheed is used for example, this can illicit a strong response from the audience due to current events such as recent attacks by the terrorist group ISIS. Cookin’ with Cymatics can use sound in this way to keep abreast of current events and stay relevant. It also probes into deeper underlying themes. The jihadi nasheed played through a speaker represents the indoctrination and propaganda being used to radicalize individuals and incite acts of terrorism. The use of a speaker pulls on all of the context that speakers have been used in such as torture, indoctrination, and all contexts of weaponized sound. The undulating cymatic dough and blood on the cymatic range represent these indoctrinated individuals and victims and the violence and bloodshed that is created in the physical world. Another element to introduce here is the use of feedback. In this example, a feedback loop can be used to represent the feedback loop of the cycles of violence evident in the current world. Terrorist attacks and corresponding invasions and military interventions spur each other on much as the jihadi nasheed interacts with the western cooking show creating a feedback loop that further drives and violently perturbs the cymatic dough, the central element that has replaced the food normally used for sustenance.

Chapter 3 begins with an exploration into sinusoidal motion. It outlines where sine waves are observed (everywhere) and the types of motion that make them. The first thing that struck me was the double tuning fork which looks somewhat like a tree. It seems like an awesome opportunity for an art project and it even has interesting modes of vibration to be analyzed. The obvious next step in my mind would be to take this further and add more forks to create interesting chords. A number of different forks could be made, which does sound very expensive, and they could then be used to create a piece.

The next thing that struck me was the method of visualizing the beats of tuning forks. Jules Antoine Lissajous devised a an apparatus to magnify the vibrations of the tuning forks by shining light onto attached mirrors that was then projected onto a surface. Helmholtz also used a modified version of this himself. I think there could be some great audio visual projects using such raw visualizations.

The rest of the chapter went into the rough details of Fourier decomposition.

The authors start off by defining Sound Studies:

“... an emerging interdisciplinary area that studies the material production and consumption of music, sound, noise, and silence, and how these have changed throughout history and within different societies, but does so from a much broader perspective than standard disciplines...”

This seems to be harkening back to the Sterne intro to the Sound Studies Reader. I’m not sure why they used the word “material” as this seems rather limiting. I initially thought that this definition was very non-inclusive of the more technical and science related elements of the field, but the rest of the article was really focused on how science and technology studies (S&TS) has a great deal to contribute. I think the definition of this field could be even broader, including even more science and technology, not just “STS” which seems to be the study of the study of science and technology, more focused on historical, cultural, and even philosophical impact, which is all for sure necessary and important but even more needs to be included. It is difficult to consider our “consumption of music, sound, noise, and silence” without discussing cognitive science and psychology not to mention the physiology of the auditory system. I do understand that the intent of this special edition article of the SSS is to address the field of STS in the context of Sound Studies. 

One vocab word that they used that I had to look up was technoscience. In context, this seemed to mean the same thing as STS but it turns out that this is a subset of STS focused on the connection between technology and science. They brought this up to talk about how the worlds of scientists and technologists are very visual words in the sense that data, graphs, instruments, maps, scientific journals, etc are all purely visual. This is an astute observation and I think it stems from how it is easier for visual data to be more quantitative compared to aural data and also because everyone in our society has been doing it this way which just perpetuates itself. There might also be more variations in how people hear - the trained ear of a mastering engineer will hear sounds differently compared to the average person and the engineer could probably glean more information from a sonified data set, whereas they might have less disparate interpretations of a simple visual scatter plot. Still, with data sonification in mind (and I was glad that the authors briefly mentioned this field) there is a lot of space for fields like data sonification to grow and develop and provide novel and possibly better means of presenting and consuming data in the scientific realm. In this same paragraph the authors brought up sonar and how this is an extraordinarily useful application of acoustics. This brought to mind a recent neuroscience advancement I heard of called sonogenetics. It is basically like optogenetics (using light to control the activation of cells like neurons) but instead activating these cells with ultrasound waves amplified by tiny bubbles which they were able to do in the worm model C. elegans. This is just another recent example of technologies based on sound proving useful in science.

This chapter seemed more accessible in comparison to the previous reading on this topic by Olson, possibly because it is a more recent text. Johnston uses fewer analogies but they are easier to understand. Johnston also goes into less detail so for specific formulas to calculate the acoustic properties of different classes of objects it will still be useful to go back to the Olson chapter. I actually want to re-read some parts because I think they will be easier to understand after reading this. 

I enjoyed hearing about the history of the early days of electricity and Johnston puts forth an interesting idea about this. He suggests that the Romantic Movement had an impact on the field of Physics, with Michael Faraday being a great example of this. He described Faraday as an honest and down to earth scientist, so modest that he turned down awards and prestigious positions. He juxtaposes Faraday’s concept of fields with the Newtonian concept of working with particles. He places Faraday within Romanticism and other more mathematically and “point” driven scientists within the preceding Enlightenment and the time that follows the Romantic Movement. While it might seem like a stretch that art influences science to such a degree, I think this makes a lot of sense and the cultural climate of a time and place have a huge effect on how people think.

Another thing that I found interesting was how so many of the “fathers” of electrical engineering came from an acoustics background and switched to studying electricity while this was in vogue. 

One thing that I got out of this chapter was what acoustic impedance really is. I’m going to write it out here, less of a reflection but for my own benefit. Acoustic impedance is essentially the property of a medium that describes how an acoustic wave travels through it. It is equal to pressure x density / area. It makes sense that it is inversely proportional to area because a pipe with a very small radius will have a much higher impedance compared to a very large pipe. As area increases, acoustic impedance decreases and vice versa. It also makes sense that a more dense medium will have a higher impedance than a less dense medium. I like how Johnston first talked about Newton’s Cradle and the analogy of two balls on strings striking each other. These analogies make sense to us intuitively and directly relate the acoustics to the mechanics. He brings up the conservation of momentum and elegantly explains how inertia in mechanics is just like acoustic impedance. A sound wave traveling from a large pipe (high area, low impedance) to a small pipe (low area, high impedance) is like a small ball (low mass, low momentum) striking a large ball (high mass, high momentum). In this example, much of the force or wave will be reflected back due to the mismatch in mass/area or momentum/impedance. A ball striking another ball with the same mass will transfer all of its energy to the other ball, just like how a pipe with a sound wave will transfer this sound wave through to another similarly shaped pipe with minimal reflection.

One thought I had is what it would be like for one person to play the physical instrument and another to play the EM actuated element via Midi. I think this would be a cool duet and a great opportunity to compose something different. 

This EMvibe seems a lot like the Magnetic Resonator Piano which doesn’t surprise me as it cited and discussed that article and shared an author. They seem similar in the sense that they are both augmented instruments. One difference is that this one used MaxMSP. I like this as someone who uses Max because it could be easily modified as opposed to something more rigid like hardware (but maybe less robust?). I do think there is some kind of appeal to hardware that is lost when using Max but can’t talk as that is what I have always used for everything.

I was again glad that the Olson article came before this one. There were some complex equations and diagrams once you got to the meat of this article but they are displayed well and speak to the thoroughness of the article. I thought it was interesting that a single piezo sensor was used to detect the motion of all the strings. I did not know that they could be that sensitive and have enough resolution to compute the motion of each single string from the net signal. I also thought it was interesting that they used filtering instead of a fourier transform to decompose the signal. It does make sense as the filtering is probably much lighter processor-wise and better suited for live processing of data.

This instrument definitely seemed more complex than the EMdrum but through this it is much more constrained in its application. I was struck by the picture of the physical setup. It really does look like a hybrid instrument with the circuitboard sending cables directly into the piano like some kind of robot infecting and taking it over. 

It was refreshing to read this article after the Olson chapter. I really liked how concise it was with no wasted space while still giving a good history and overview of similar instruments. I wasn’t able to google any samples of the EMdrum so I am very curious to hear it. From the description, I get the impression that it will sound something like a timpani drum as it seems to be a bass drum with interesting resonances based upon what instrument or audio input is given and what frequencies that is playing at.

This reading was jam packed with information. It was very dense but I feel like I could come back and refer to this if I am working on a project and need to take the resonant and directional qualities of an object or instrument into account. 

I really like the idea of drawing analogies from and borrowing the electrical circuit to expand the lines of reasoning in mechanics and acoustics. This has been useful in other fields such as neuroscience if you look at the Hodgkin-Huxley model. These scientists studied the squid axon and were able to come up with a a series of equations to model the cell membrane and action potential. Their work can be represented as an electrical circuit diagram with elements like the cell membrane for example represented as a capacitor. This laid the groundworks for neural modeling so I definitely agree with Olson’s premise that these analogies are useful. It is interesting that the Hodgkin Huxley model was published in 1952, the same year as this book.

Another thing that caught my eye was the trombone and how it can have an infinite number of resonant frequencies by changing the length of the tube. I never thought of it exactly in this way and it will be interesting to explore resonance through an instrument like my trombone. 

I like how Chion explored how we categorize sound through causal listening via indices. It makes sense that our brains can get a general sense of a sound and come up with a category that likely matches the source based on other sounds we have heard before. These different categories might be organized and separated spatially in the brain and it would be neat to explore how this comes to be and how our brain chooses to relate sounds to one another.

From hearing about acousmatic music, it does not surprise me that Schaefer has coined the term reduced listening. I had not thought of the specific ways of describing sounds before but it does make sense to separate the cause or perceived cause of a sound from the sound itself. This is critical not only for objective listening, but for establishing a language to discuss sound.

In this chapter, Sterne takes on the daunting task of defining sound studies. From my limited but growing contextual knowledge I think he did a good job. He mentions the extremely varied backgrounds that “sound students” come from as is to be expected in such an interdisciplinary field. 

One point that he hit on was how sound studies and sound students are conscious of their own historicity and work within the context of their core concepts and objects. In reading these passages I see the importance of this and how difficult it is to innovate without have a solid grasp of the background knowledge. I remember when I was young I put pencils into our piano and made effectively a prepared piano (while fearing I would be yelled at by my mom). I did not know until recently that prepared pianos were around, especially for such a long time with such a storied and now venerated history. I also made a max patch for a class project during undergrad relying on “random” numbers to determine what notes, chords, and rhythms would be played. I had no concept of aleatoric music at the time so could not really say more than “I made a neat patch check it out” without the context. Historical context as Sterne says is important so as to not reinvent the wheel and to expand ones views on what is possible, fostering innovation. It is also important for communicating to other students within the field and collaborating.

Through reading this passage I got a sense of Sterne’s excitement for the subject matter. It also got me excited to see where I fit into the picture as a sound student. 

I got somewhat lost in Chapter 4. It was striking to hear about some of these pieces like smashing a violin, shaving a head, or going to the gas station and pumping up a tire until it explodes. If normally events like this would serve as inspiration to create something like a picture, audio track, or painting, then these get rid of the middle man in a way. Maybe like removing the lens from a camera. It seems like the possibilities in this area are unlimited as it is so open-ended and you could really toy with the idea of what art actually is. LaBelle mentions a number of pieces that blur the line between artist, performer, and audience as well as our actual perception of events and sense of self. There is definitely a lot to explore here. 

Another thing that struck me was how vibrant and nurturing the community seemed. Everyone seemed very open and willing to try new things which I think facilitates the art and the community. It must have been exciting to attend (and in doing so become a performer at) these happenings and other events centered around avant-garde performances. 

Chapter 10 I was able to follow a little more easily. I liked how, again, many of the pieces and installations involved their audiences directly. The Neuhaus piece was a cool way to start it off. I can see how this was inspired by Cageian ideas and as LaBelle says, a move from music to sound. Through installing his works out in the public, It seems to be almost the opposite approach as Cage’s 4′33″ which turns music to sound within the concert hall space, yet still addresses the same underlying idea. Drive in Music also incorporates random variables into itself through its position in the environment as a part of the geography which I thought was an awesome idea and also tied in well. 

I think this article brought up a lot of very cool possibilities for walking sound art. The experience of walking while listening to something brought to mind augmented reality and VR devices. It might be cool to have an aural HUD as opposed to a visual one. You could have a headset which based on your location, added sounds to what you are hearing providing additional information. The examples given in this article are all tied to a pre-determined place, whether it is an installation or a planned route, but today I think a lot could be done incorporating GPS and a mobile device utilizing the internet as Butler hinted at towards the end of the article. A microphone array could also be incorporated into this and the live audio signals from the current environment could be processed in some way to further add information or create an interesting experience while also recording the environment for others to experience in the future. If there were a number of these devices they could even communicate with one another. For example, if there is a place where multiple recordings have been made, whenever a device walks near this environment, it could play some version of the previous recordings, enriching the experience for the person that is there and providing a more “full” sense of the place. Recordings that people find more interesting could be given precedent over other recordings to provide the most useful information as determined by crowd-sourcing.

I really liked the sound walk that was described in this article entitled Linked by Graeme Miller. It draws a stark contrast between the past history of the M11 with the present, all within a social context addressing the controversy surrounding the construction of the road. Experiencing that piece must be even  more intense for those people that lived there and were displaced. I can only imagine how surreal it would be to be in the same place where you had lived for years, hearing the sounds from that time, but at the same time being accosted by the sights and sounds of cars driving by. It made me think of a man-made lake near my house that is situated over what used to be a town. I always wondered what was under the surface there and what that town was like. I think surreal places like this offer a unique opportunity to create compelling art.  

Some quick thoughts: It was funny that the first computer bug was a literal bug. It was surprising that “specification” is the leading cause of bugs accounting for over 50%. Coming from an ecology background, it struck me that searching for software bugs is akin to sampling an ecosystem to find species. The graph in the book that had the point of optimal amount of testing is similar to the graphs they use to extrapolate species richness/abundance/accumulation

From wikipedia: “the species discovery curve ... is a graph recording the cumulative number of species of living things recorded in a particular environment as a function of the cumulative effort expended searching for them (usually measured in person-hours).”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_discovery_curve

As a trombone player: Yes.

I found the authors definitions of improvisation interesting. I never really thought of improvisation on such a deep level. I had always thought of it as playing whatever you feel like, however you want to express it, or in the context of a jazz band, playing whatever notes you feel like in the particular jazz scale. There is clearly more at play in musical improvisation including the “techniques, styles, aesthetic attitudes, antecedents and networks of cultural and social practice” as the author says. I believe that I always did think in this way, but it was completely internalized and I never actually critically thought about what musical improvisation actually is. Through reading the article, I can see why establishing definitions for these terms is essential when creating a computer program capable of completing or collaborating on the same tasks.

One thing that caught my eye in this article was the mention of “‘trombone-propelled’ electronics” by Nicholas Collins in the context of “controllers”. As a trombone player, I had to check this out and I found a very crazy youtube video of Collins playing this insane instrument that he created. It was very inspiring and makes me want to do some type of project with my trombone.