We take photos to capture the moments meaningful to us. However, sound is invisible and it’s hard to capture the fleeting memories in a physical and more interactive form. Inspired by this ignored aspect, this experimental project tries to capture the meaningful sound to an individual. Through visualizing the invisible sound into topographic forms, a synthesized soundscape, the project is a subjective art expression of a person’s sound memory.

In this project,we recorded five typical sounds from one’s everyday life, including the natural sound of the sea, urban noise from traffic, people talking in the cafe, lectures in the classroom, and dog barking at home. We translated the oscillating sound waves to human motions, and then used HTC to track the motions. We wrote c# scripts to transform the traditional sound waves into 3-dimensional landscapes and combine them based on subjective understanding of how important the sound is to an individual.

Synthesized soundscape is part of an artistic process of conceptually understanding the sound. It’s the starting point for us to test out the potential for our project to visualize sounds as part of collective memories and to serve as an interactive interface for people to better understand urban environments.