"EL Wire Two" - Electroluminescent Wire & Music |
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This is the final artwork in performance. These are 30-second movie clips which were taken with the Canon S110 Digital Elph at 20fps and 8K mono. The files were edited in iMovie HD and some clips were removed. The processing included changing the "levels" of each individual frame to retain the black but bring up the light since the Canon is notoriously slow in weak light and noisy to boot. The artwork consists of seven one meter strands of electroluminescent wire in seven colors formed into an amorphous shape inside a 10 1/2 inch cube of clear acrylic. The wires represent the different "spectra" of the music being fed to it. The source is an iPod playing my collection and connected to the artwork through a 100-watt monophonic amplifier (both left and right channels are mixed down before going to the amp). The output of the amplifier is plugged directly into two speaker lugs on the backside of the artwork. Inside the artwork base the speaker wires feed a six-way crossover network through a step-up transformer. The output of the crossover network feeds the seven wires directly (two wires are in tandem on one "spectral" port of the crossover). The frequency breakdown is as follows - red wire is lowest (20-800Hz), green is next lowest (20-1600Hz), blue is mid-range (800-5000Hz), purple and yellow are high mid-range (1600-7000Hz), orange is tweeter (5000-20000Hz), and pink is super-tweeter (7000-20000Hz). Each wire also exhibits color-shift by frequency, so in addition to being broken into spectral bands directly, each of the seven wires responds differentially to frequency anyway. The voltage needed to drive the wire to a minimum viewable brightness level is on the order of 20 volts-alternating. Maximum brightness levels are reached at about 130 volts-alternating. In between, the light level appears to be a reasonable linear function. It's fascinating and no two songs look the same - even if they "seem" to have all the same frequencies. The artwork gives "visual" form to the music in a way which would allow for a visual "typing" of music. Not just a Fourrier transform of the waveform/energy spectrum, but a true, analog conversion of sound (music) into light, proportional to both frequency and amplitude. Direct link to movie file is http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/concepts/ELwireTwoMedium.mov . |