Chinese-soul.com: Sound spectra visualized
Web developer Andreas Weber created a website for the launch of the CD «Chinese Soul» by the jazz ensemble Werner Fischer’s Travelogue. As part of this project, he visualized sound spectra.
According to Weber, the visualization of sound spectra is the most direct way to visually represent a musical experience. With programs such as Flash, the values can be queried at short intervals and converted into visual patterns: animated bar charts, waves, clouds or even psychedelic colored shapes. For Chinese-soul.com the sound spectra were not realized as abstract patterns, but combined with representational drawings. A drawing program was written for this purpose, with which the sketches could be recorded, played back and edited.
It seems as if it is the music itself that draws the line. According to the band name Werner Fischer's Travelogue, the guiding metaphor for the content of the drawings was the travel diary: light, ink-like sketches, handwritten text and a leisurely yet steady forward movement of the line. In addition, the song lyrics penned by Publicis lyricist Jan Krohn appear synchronously below the drawing.
Motiondraw.com
Weber's first Flash project was a drawing program that allowed users to create their own drawings on their home computer and send them as e-cards. Later, he wrote a program for an American teacher that teaches his students how and in what order to draw the glyphs of the Japanese Katakana alphabet. And last year, he created a tool that enabled an Australian NGO to record and replay the signatures of citizens who wanted to register online as voters. This and other work is documented at the web address www.motiondraw.com.
