Project Overview

Building on the works of Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Fischinger, this project explores visualizing sound as individual colored notes in an organized spiral form. The project began with the discovery of the spiral form, and was developed into a screen based interactive program and physically controlled interactive table-top device.

Part 1 – Discovery of the Spiral Form

While trying to find a way to optimally visualize the relationships between musical notes, the discovery was made of a spiral arrangement; not only did the spiral represent the tonal changes between adjacent notes, but it also revealed the relationship between the same note in different octaves.

Part 2 – Sound Spiral Animation

A hypothesis was made that harmonic music would create visual geometric patterns such as triangles and squares within the sound spiral. To explore this, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was digitally encoded and accompanied by an animation in which each note was illuminated at the same moment it was heard.

Part 3 – Interactive Program

A live interactive version of the sound spiral was created using Processing.
Watch a video that demonstrates the program, or follow the link to the actual program.

Link to the LIVE INTERACTIVE PROGRAM.

Part 4 – Interactive Physical Prototype

A physical prototype of the sound spiral was built using the Arduino platform. An array of reed switches were used to activate each individual note, and a magnetic wand was implemented to trigger each switch. The signals were sent from the Arduino to the Processing program, allowing a user to play the sound spiral with their hands, rather than just the mouse.

Video Demonstration of the device connected to a laptop running the Processing sketch.


Video Demonstration of chord mode and wand interface.

Project Summary

This study explored taking a live video stream and processing it to simulate three dimensions. The luminosity of each video pixel was analyzed and mapped to the depth of individual cells in an array of extruded rectilinear volumes. This technique of mapping luminosity to depth is identical to rendering physical textures in most 3d rendering engines.



Concept and code are original, using Processing and its built in video library. Note that only a standard web-cam was employed in this project and that the study took place more than one year before the Microsoft Kinect was released.

Project Overview

Is there a way to simply visualize a massive dataset like 80+ years of stock market data? This programming project investigated this question and visualized Dow Jones Industrial Average data for instantaneous, simple analysis.

Link to the LIVE INTERACTIVE PROGRAM.
Concept and Code by Digital Noah. Programmed with Processing.

Video Demonstration