Advanced Beauty is an ongoing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects to create audio-reactive ‘video sound sculptures’ using the visual programming language Processing, high-end audio analysis and fluid dynamic simulations alongside intuitive responses in traditional cell animation.
The first series of films were inspired by the neurological phenomenon of Sound → color synesthesia, a condition where an individual will perceive colors based on different tonal qualities of music. Each artist was given the same set of parameters to work within. What they come up, you’ll need to see for yourself, or imagine yourself the next time your listening to music, and maybe you will see colorful imagery like blobs of blue throbbing with the powerful bass as a golden melody of violins cascades over top and sharp red horn lines interject high punctuating notes.
About Advanced beauty
Advanced Beauty is an ongoing exploration of digital artworks born and influenced by sound, an ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects.
The first collection is a series of audio-reactive ‘video sound sculptures’. Inspired by Synesthesia, the rare, sensory experience of seeing sound or tasting colours, these videos are physical manifestations of sound, sculpted by volume, pitch or structure of the soundtrack.
The films embrace unusual video making processes, the visual programming language Processing, high-end audio analysis and fluid dynamic simulations alongside intuitive responses in traditional cell animation. Each artist was given the same set of parameters to work within; to start, finish and exist within a white space, creating a seamless coherence, all sculptures sharing the same white environment.
Using 1920 HD format, with 5:1 surround sound, the films transform the screen into a digital canvas, how the minimalism of a single, floating pixel can be as engaging as the maximalism of an intense multicoloured explosion.
Curated by Universal Everything and musician Freeform, Advanced Beauty is an international collaboration, taking in a family of artists from London, Russia, New York, Japan, Buenos Aires, Glasgow to San Francisco.
This collection of films in the first in a series of exhibitions, with upcoming commissions for the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and galleries in Europe, USA and Japan.
Sound → color synesthesia
In sound → color synesthesia, individuals experience colors in response to tones or other aspects of sounds. Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues break this type of synesthesia into two categories, which they call “narrow band” and “broad band” sound → color synesthesia. In narrow band sound → color synesthesia (often called music → color synesthesia), musical stimuli (e.g., timbre or key) will elicit specific color experiences, such that a particular note will always elicit red, or harps will always elicit the experience of seeing a golden color. In broadband sound → color synesthesia, on the other hand, a variety of environmental sounds, like an alarm clock or a door closing, may also elicit visual experiences.
Color changes in response to different aspects of sound stimuli may involve more than just the hue of the color. Any dimension of color experience (see HSL color space) can vary. Brightness (the amount of white in a color; as brightness is removed from red, for example, it fades into a brown and finally to black), saturation (the intensity of the color; fire engine red and medium blue are highly saturated, while grays, white, and black are all unsaturated), and hue may all be affected to varying degrees. Additionally, music → color synesthetes, unlike grapheme → color synesthetes, often report that the colors move, or stream into and out of their field of view.
Like grapheme → color synesthesia, there is rarely agreement amongst music → color synesthetes that a given tone will be a certain color. However, when larger samples are studied, consistent trends can be found, such that higher pitched notes are experienced as being more brightly colored. The presence of similar patterns of pitch-brightness matching in non-synesthetic subjects suggests that this form of synesthesia shares mechanisms with non-synesthetes.
movement of sounds and color building a representation of your minds eye and its connection to your surrounds…interpretaion of sound and color…
a construction of colors building to the pulse of music…hearing color….
one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway
