Most media player visualizations are nothing more than an extra aesthetic touch during playback. Whether they're swirls of color or light shows, they look great as a replacement for classic screen savers, but that's all. With the advance of 3D printers, the story changes completely, and that's how Sonic Sculptures appears: an application that generates designs ready to print from your favorite songs.
When Windows 98 ruled the world and we still depended on the magic of telephone modems, one of the most interesting details for anyone watching a computer play music was the visualizations in programs like Windows Media Player or Winamp. It was a rather original way to add some color to gray, serious desktops, without falling into the clutches of that system destroyer called Windows Plus! (the horror, the horror…). Over time, operating systems improved their appearance, music moved to other devices, and visualizations were pushed aside. Of course, nothing prevents us from using them today, and with the help of graphics cards, it's possible to reach much higher resolutions. Our favorite music generates all kinds of patterns on visualizations, but what happens when it comes to taking that to the three-dimensional world?
https://vimeo.com/70292072The answer is Sonic Sculptures, a program developed by Blair Neal. The software is based on openFrameworks and ofxFFT, so it has the ability to create 3D models of our songs and transform them into a compatible format that allows direct printing. The root of the models depends on Fast Fourier Transform analysis, measuring intensity across different frequency ranges. Sonic Sculptures is far from perfect, and requires several adjustments before obtaining viable results, but its development is no passing fad, and it will improve over time. The code is available under Creative Commons, and for now, the build is only compatible with OS X, although the Windows version is already confirmed.
Sonic Sculptures should work with most songs; however, the most logical approach here is to treat it with a little patience. As for the shape each model can take, there are several options. The spiral stands out as one of the most popular, but we've also seen bracelets, which with translucent plastic don't look bad at all. The rest will depend on what each printer can do.
As we already know well, 3D printing is more art than science, and each user will have to experiment on their own.
