By investigating the conceptual field sound, tone, pitch, timbre in its relation to visual phenomena and geometrical concepts, the project Sound Colour Space. A Virtual Museum contributes to an interdisciplinary field of research and aims to explore its adequate modes of representation and communication.
By investigating the conceptual field sound, tone, pitch, timbre in its relation to visual phenomena and geometrical concepts, the project Sound Colour Space. A Virtual Museum contributes to an interdisciplinary field of research and aims to explore its adequate modes of representation and communication.
Many scientists and philosophers from antiquity to modern times have studied the relationships between sound, light and geometry. Many of their visualisations on acoustical, optical and perceptual topics speak to the eye and can be studied comparatively. These pictures are interesting because of their diagrammatic structure, in the way they combine text, images and spatial structures on a flat surface and in the way they address topological, philosophical and psychological questions. They often have an aesthetic value of their own. The interdependencies between sound and light, physics and perception seen through the spectacles of geometry, i.e., by using mathematics as a kind of universal meta-language, is a topos of the history of science and philosophy, which can be traced back to Greek antiquity (Pythagoras, Aristoxenos, Aristotle and Euclid) and traced forward to recent discourses in philosophy and aesthetics.
The collection and study of these materials and the attempts to present them as a sequential text lead to the question of adequate forms of representation. Since a given picture or graphic can appear in various contexts and with different implications, a distinct network architecture permits forms of content representation free from redundancies in a way that is difficult to achieve in textual form. Accordingly, we will analyse our collection of scientific illustrations and diagrams (currently about 1000 image files) and present them together with related materials and findings within a dynamical and open online publication. Thereby, the metaphor «museum» is rendered as a place where people and objects meet and interact in various dynamic modes. Visitors to the museum will gain access to the collection of pictures and they can compare and regroup the pictures, read explanations, listen to sound examples, watch animations and interact with audio-visual applications, or they can just follow guided tours. Scientists and scholars will use the museum as a research tool and add to the contents of the underlying database. The planned application will be built upon the Media Archive of the Arts developed at the ZHdK and will contribute to the further development of this online platform as a research tool.
The structure of scientific knowledge in general and the topics of our project in particular can be captured by relational models as used in computer science. Object-oriented and relational data modelling offer means of interpreting «the world» in ways that exceed classical sequential and hierarchical organisations of knowledge by highlighting relational and dynamical aspects of the objects and processes under consideration (cf. Meier / Wüst 2000, 11–52).
These ways of organising and representing knowledge have their precursors in the early seventeenth century. Robert Fludd’s Temple of Music (1618) is a kind of virtual museum. Fludd takes the temple’s architecture as a metaphor for science, where all topics related to music have a place in space. Within the main text of the treatise, the different parts of the temple are fully developed and «curated» – sometimes by adding extra pictures, sometimes by using «tree sentences» and sometimes in ordinary Latin language. This creates a network of science (see Fig. 1, 2).