There’s an extensive exhibition of one of my favourite painters, Pierre Bonnard, on at Glyptoteket – with some intriguing sound vignettes by @lydrummet and @sunheeengelstoft to accompany some of them.

A little difficult to hear with the so many summer visitors, but beautiful nonetheless, and opening up details of the paintings in unexpected ways. They got me thinking back to a lecture that David Toop gave in Copenhagen a number of years ago on the topic of sound in paintings.

I’ve been fascinated by the Rob Hordijk’s description (in the Sines and Squares masterclass video) of how one might think about sound in three dimensions (rather than the two we are used to on our screens) and how sine and cosine waves can be used to describe the phase and amplitude of a resulting wave, defining its waveshape over time.

He describes it as a corkscrew waveform, also occurring in nature, with the phase describing its rotation, and the amplitude, distance. When viewed on an XY oscilloscope with a slow sine modulating the amplitude of the sine and cosine, it looks like a circle approaching from the distance and receding again. With very low frequencies one can view it as rotating points and get an even better idea of the ‘corkscrew’ effect.

This helps fill out some background on Hordijk’s thinking of sound in terms of depth – for example with his fluctuation waveform, in which amplitude and frequency modulation are combined to provide a special kind of vibrato. Based on a rounded triangle ‘parabol’ waveform, the larger the wave is, the lower the frequency – i.e the lower part of the frequency fluctuation corresponds to the higher part of the amplitude modulation. In his 2015 masterclass on Waveshaping & Fluctuation Hordijk describes this waveform (when modulated) as advancing and receding – giving a perspective effect.

I’ve uploaded a little demo patch (used to create the gif above) to the Audulus forum.

The October issue of The California Sunday Magazine is dedicated to sound. The print edition includes numbers that refer to audio footnotes that can be accessed via their website.

In 2007, around the time Heston Blumenthal famously included sound as an integral, taste altering, part of his multi-sensory dish Sound of the Sea, Lars Kynde was looking for ways in which Wagamama’s loudspeaker system could be put to better use. Those experiments eventually led to the creation of his Tasteful Turntable, an ever evolving project in which sound and taste are intricately choreographed to the timeline of a turning table. With brands now in on the game, as described in Ben Houge’s NewMusicBox article, this synaesthetic field is apparently no longer exclusively the domain of (culinary) art and performance.