3D Sound Sculpture

3D Sound Sculpture was created in collaboration with Edward Tang.

Video of the installation in Windows Media Player format high speed connection or low speed connection

Online version:
Click here to view the internet version of this project.
The internet version requires shockwave player and latest 3D graphics card.

Description by Edward Tang
Artists and thinkers have been attempting to visualize music and sound for a long time. The field of music visualization is one field that has greatly benefited from technology. It has it roots in the world of dance, where choreographers created an expansive vocabulary using the human body to give visual life to music. Later light, lasers, and computer graphics were all used to attempt to enhance the experience of listening to music by creating visuals that react to music's various subjective traits.

However, technology can also be used to empower the audience to create themselves without any sort of prior experience or training. The 3D Sound Sculpture is an example of that sort of art. Instead of taking a preexisting piece of musical work and interpreting it, what the artist aims to do is create interactive palettes of color, shape, and sound and a empty canvas for the participant to fill the blanks in. This in itself presents a new challenge for sound artists and composers, and will spark a new style of composition to match this new way of presenting music to the public.

Using simple playful building blocks, the user can build his or her own sculpture and listen to the spatialized sounds of the cubes creating the illusions of 3D Sound. 3D graphics provide a powerful spatial quality that 2 dimensional shapes can't duplicate.

By building a sculpture out of multiple sound cubes, there is less emphasis on a conventional linear style of playback and more emphasis on the interesting interactions between neighboring sound cubes in three dimensional space. A simple interface and system of building encourages more natural forms of surprise and complexity.

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