Jared Ficklin plays with visual representations of sound, often finding creative, artistic ways to show us how humans have an innate ability to “hear” visual waveforms and frequency diagrams.
Ficklin’s audio-visual inventions include several fire-based contraptions that intricately show how music affects physical environments. While these devices have no practical application, they’re ideal for introducing visual representations of sound in an exciting way. Ficklin also designed programs that show representations of music from different artists. The representations allow viewers to feel the music visually and could seriously improve the effects of closed-caption recordings by adding a more immersive visual element to broadcasts.
Perhaps more impressively, Jared showed a TED audience a graph of audio recordings taken at Mabel Davis skate park. Ficklin placed eight microphones around the park and logged data for about a day. By analyzing the audio signals from the park, Ficklin can accurately determine the ratio of successful to failed trick attempts. He also notes that skaters’ behavior changed markedly when an advanced skater began to perform tricks at the park. The audio analysis shows that most of the other skaters in the park altered their courses to stay perpendicular with the advanced skater and out of his way.
Ficklin’s audio analyses are sometimes artistic and breathtaking in their scope. As a tribute to legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, Ficklin made an audio graph from Hawking’s eight-hour Cambridge lecture series, making points on a three-dimensional graph that showed the start of every one of Hawking’s sentences. Ficklin then used stars to mark each point, allowing for a completely navigable 3D universe made entirely out of Hawking’s speeches.
Jared Ficklin knows that sound is powerful, and as he puts it, “sound moves in all directions, and so do ideas.” By developing our understanding of sound and how it relates to the other senses, we can find new ways to improve our communication skills and learn more about the ways that we interact with one another.