EMAILED FRED COLLOPY
February 2005
Obsessively googling for everything synaesthetic I arrived at the website
of Fred Collopy called "Rhythmic Light" where I found a host of
information on historical colour organs, sound/colour charts through the ages,
articles, papers, etc, including Fred Collopy's own work in this field.
I was particularly interested in his approach to eliciting colour/shape (lumia)
via audio (and vice versa) which pays special attention to rhythm. In collaboration
with Robert M. Fuhrer he has designed a software tool called Sonnet+Imager.
Here is an abstract about the project taken from the website:
Sonnet+Imager is an object-based toolkit for creating instruments that
produce abstract graphics in real-time. It is implemented as a visual programming
language of the component-circuit variety. It was designed by identifying
and addressing some of the principle limitations in the Max-based graphics
engine, Imager. Beyond that, we wanted to address rhythm directly. This required
us to make time a first-class element of the language. The model of time relies
for its power on the notion of functors, an encapsulation of mathematical
functions that can be related to the dimensions of rhythm. All of the elements
of time manifest themselves directly in the visual language, as components
and data packets, thereby creating natural flows that describe rhythmic structures.
The resulting design is modular, intuitive, interactive and extensible.
I emailed Fred to request the whole paper - and received it along with a cd-rom
of some of his work called "Unauthorized Duets", complete with 3D
glasses!
Thank you Fred!