benjamin maus
is . he codes, tinkers and designs in berlin at the moment.
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Reflection
context
free
category
misc
Description
Reflection is a data sculpture, which was inspired by and derived from the musical piece by Frans de Waard of the same title. The sculpture was commissioned by the 5 Days Off Festival in Amsterdam for the »Frozen« exhibition. Reflection is characterized by 12 musical motives, which appear in an almost linear succession.
Process
To show the individual makeup of the motives, they were divided into the smallest distinctive parts and analyzed with custom software. A FFT frequency spectrum analysis was performed on these audio clips. The resulting intensity values were arranged in a coordinate system consisting of frequency and time. Higher intensity values for a given frequency at a given time resulted in an elevation of the generated mesh.
This effectively produced a heightfield representing the spectral structure of the music. Further optimizations like adaptive filtering and logarithmic scaling of the values were performed to better represent the human way of hearing and to enhance details.
The meshes created in this fashion were then arranged horizontally on two conjoined tracks. The final sculpture was created with a CNC Milling Machine.
Meta
This project came into being in collaboration with Andreas Nicolas Fischer.
Material: CNC-milled MDF, Dimensions: 900mm x 720mm x 120mm.
The other Artists participating in the show are Shajay Booshan, Leander Herzog, Daniel Widrig and Marius Watz.
