What does sound look like? That's the question students in an honors art class explored at Dakota State University this fall.
"Each honors class, I assign an ecological project," said Angela Behrends, assistant professor of art. "The topic I chose for this past semester was sound."
The collages which resulted are currently on exhibit at Sundog Coffee -- with an added dimension: sound. Each collage is framed with a QR code which links it to a musical composition. That work was done by DSU students in Intro to Sound Design.
"I'm always looking for ways we can get more people involved and get more energy going," Behrends said.
This is the second project this year that has blended sound with the visual arts. Earlier this year, a soundtrack was developed for an exhibit that was first on display in the First Bank and Trust Gallery in the Karl E. Mundt Library. Shadow Casting will be on display at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls next summer.
That exhibit was developed in response to the darkness of the global pandemic and invited viewers to become light in that darkness. With Shadow Casting, students in 3-D Design class created wire sculptures of animals that were displayed in semi-darkness. Viewers used the flashlight app on their smart devices to cast shadows using the sculptures.
A sound component was added a week before the exhibit was taken down and will be an integral part of the exhibit at the Pavilion.
With the current exhibit, Behrends challenged her students to consider the impact of sound on matter. She began by introducing them to the work of Hans Jenny, a 20th Century Swiss physician and natural scientist who coined the term "cymatics" to describe the visual effects of sound on matter.
Behrends asked students to read several articles on this. She also shared videos where students saw how different sound frequencies caused different patterns to form when sand was scattered on a flat surface and vibrated at that frequency.
"As they were watching these videos, I had them drawing and taking notes on pieces of paper," she said. This allowed students to free associate ideas and images.
Once they had done this, they were ready to begin working on their collages.
"I asked them to dig into our magazine collection and design a collage that was about sound," Behrends said. This process, by its very nature, also encourages students to free associate possibilities rather than plan a design.
"When you're working with collage, you can't decide what things are going to look like until you find the images," said Anna Vonkeman, one of the students in ART121, 2-D Design.
She said she was intimidated by the project when she first began working on it. However, she began to think about the sounds in nature which have meant a lot to her, and that helped her to sense the direction she hoped to go with her piece.
"I used visuals that would have connotations with sound -- musical instruments, people with open mouths, rushing water, etcetera -- hoping that when somebody looked at the composition, they would hear the sounds in their imagination," Vonkeman said.
Another student, Liv Hermosilla, said the assignment challenged her to consider in a deeper way how sound affects individuals. She reflected on the sounds the human body makes in the process of sustaining life.
"Therefore, I decided to have a heart be the focus of the piece," she said. "I chose the heart as it does make a rhythmic drum sound. However, it is also the start of all sound created within us."
She compared the heart driving blood through the human body to a drummer in a band, providing the beat that holds the group together.
While Vonkeman looked outside herself for inspiration and Hermosilla looked inside for hers, Angela Guthmiller approached the project from the perspective of a digital sound design student aware of the technical side of sound.
"At first with this project, I was really unsure of what I would make, and I really struggled with the concept of how to make sound visual," she said.
However, once she started to think about the way music generated electronically combines a variety of elements to satisfy listeners, she had a direction.
"I combined as many technology-related elements as I could to create one piece that was at least satisfying in my own eyes," Guthmiller said.
Elliott DuCharme used a phonetic reference, incorporating images that started with the letter `b,' and another student was influenced by the designs created by the frequency vibrations in the video students watched.
"I'm sure there's a tone or frequency that could be matched to that," Behrends said, pointing to a collage which had strong geometrical components.
While students were working on the collages, she approached a colleague on campus, Sandra Champion, director of music programs, with an idea.
"I said to Sandy, `would you be willing to have your students work on having some visual images connected with sound'?" Behrends recalled.
Champion was interested, so the collages went to sound design students after they were completed. The compositions that resulted were inspired by the visual images the 2-D Design students had created.
"Some of them are almost like a scavenger hunt," Behrends said, indicating that each image inspired a different sound in some of the compositions. "Some are like an overall flavor."
The images were then linked to the compositions with QR codes when matted and framed. Together, the collection is now owned by the General Beadle Honors Program and will be on permanent exhibit on the DSU campus after being shown at Sundog Coffee through Jan. 6.
Behrends recognizes that in challenging students to explore the connection between sound and visual imagery in this way, students in both programs have created a unique body of work. How viewers and artists choose to respond to the work will be up to them.
"Some people won't care and won't get it. Some people might take it somewhere; they might go deeper," she said.
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