Eyes Can Hear

Visualizing Imogen Heap’s song “First Train Home."

By Jared Ficklin

Eyes Can HearVisualizing Imogen Heap’s song “First Train Home."By Jared Ficklin

"Making sound visible is a hobby of mine. After years pursuing real-time sound visualization, I became intrigued by the idea of eliminating time and allowing listeners to take in an entire song as a single visual impression. The result reveals an unseen beauty.

This particular piece was created by systematically restructuring pixels chosen from the image of Imogen Heap’s new Ellipse album cover. Color and symmetry were added to the image. As the song played, pixels were located via waveform, manipulated based on amplitude, and then placed on the canvas using a frequency-based algorithm.

There is a pretty unique aesthetic to different songs rendered with the same algorithm. I enjoy the notion of someone buying a song because they like the way it looks, or because it looks like a song they know they like. With the right system in hand, would members of the deaf community be interested in creating visualization-based musical performances? What would the music sound like? I also wonder if it is time to update the Closed Captioning system to include visual impressions of the music and sound effects that normally go by unseen in a movie or television show."

Jared Ficklin is a principal designer at frog design. Jared creates Flash animations of all types, including sound visualizations.