Data vis, light painting mashup exploring room acoustics
The goal for this project is to be able to photograph standing wave interference to create a kind of acoustical map of a room. Wave interference, simply put, is caused when two waves of the same frequency but different phase combine and result in a waveform that has an increased or decreased amplitude.
In order to photograph these interference or standing wave patterns, I'm playing a range of sine tones but only working with one frequency at a time in order to isolate these interferences. In any listening situation there are direct and reflected sounds. As sound leaves the source it propagates outward, reflecting off of surfaces along the way, until it reaches your ears. Depending on where you are in the room, some portion of this sound also travels directly to the ear. Because of these alternate routes (reflected and direct) we end up with differences in arrival time which can also mean differences in the phase (angle) of the wave. As these in- or out-of-phase signals reach our ear, they can cancel each other out or combine to result in a larger waveform.
The hardware and software here are part of this ongoing project.
In the interest of collaboration and good will, the files herein are offered for public use. Just don't be a jerk about it and credit me if you use it commercially :)
- Embedded systems design files: Namely .brd, .sch
- Firmware: Arduino sketches