W1 How computation applies

My passion for music and career background in the music industry have led me to all sorts of live music experiences from concerts, parties, and festivals. Throughout the years, I have been fascinated with how musical artists really pushed the boundaries of their live performances and enhanced musical expression with crazy visual effects, be it 3D hologram, giant audio-reactive light installations, or large-scale projection mapping. Music videos and other promotional materials also kept evolving with digital technology. This multi-sensory perception of the low-dimensional sound waves has been evoking our emotional responses in a way we never would have imagined. I am particularly inspired by one of my favorite producers, Max Cooper. In his project Emergence, he and fellow visual artists and scientists generated biological simulations of natural patterns following the direction of his music. And I especially admire computer artists Casey Reas and REZA, whose works exhibit the surreal beauty of pure geometrical forms generated from codes and mathematical equations. As digital technology has been revolutionizing the way music is created, I believe there is no better way to represent computer-generated sound with generative art. Therefore, this semester, I’d like to make some projects that apply computation to generate graphics to visually interpret sound or music.