What a Digital Artist Sees and Hears

column | Fun Stuff

What a Digital Artist Sees and Hears

By Betsy Corcoran (Columnist)     Jul 22, 2015

What a Digital Artist Sees and Hears
Song of the Australian King Parrot

We share this with you for no reason other than it's amazing. Australian digital artist Andy Thomas takes photos of plants, insects, birds and machines and wraps around them 3D creations that spring from his imagination. Sometimes he creates still images; other times, he adds digital audio, "creating audio life forms that react to sounds."

On his website, Thomas notes: "I've taught myself. I'm no expert."

His experiments are mesmerizing. You can see more examples of his work on his webpage here.

Enjoy!

What one artist "sees" when the birds sing

Bird Sounds Visualised from Andy Thomas on Vimeo.

Bird sounds captured using a digital audio recorder and fed into a computer to activate particle effects.

Nightingale and Canary from Andy Thomas on Vimeo.

Australian artist Andy Thomas specializes in creating ‘audio life forms’: beautiful abstract shapes that react to sounds. In this animated short, he visualizes two recorded bird sounds from the archives of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (http://www.beeldengeluid.nl) in Hilversum.

"The Nightingale & Canary video was produced to inspire creative industries professionals to submit their own projects to a Europe-wide re-use competition, organised by the Europeana Creative project [http://www.europeanacreative.eu]. All submitted projects make use of archival material available via Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu), Europe's gateway to digitized cultural heritage.

The video is part of Sound Connections (http://bit.ly/1wD3hsn), one of 5 pilots developed within the Europeana Creative project (http://bit.ly/1xgUxTW). This video was made possible with co-funding from the European Union, through the ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme.

Learn more about EdSurge operations, ethics and policies here. Learn more about EdSurge supporters here.

More from EdSurge

Get our email newsletterSign me up
Keep up to date with our email newsletterSign me up