ARIANA COWAN — ORAL ORIGAMI

An experimental study into the art of sound and sound visualization.

From frequencies to folds, this Self Initiated Project explores the technicalities of sound and its translation into a tactile piece of art.

By using audio recordings of people speaking different languages, which stem from not only my interest in language and design but also from the aim of visualising language for the hearing impaired, Ariana used inspiration from the digital visualisations created and extrapolated those into a physical form.

“Origami follows uniformity. Sound assumes irregularity. The act of folding paper and using origami made me realise that one can forge an ideal piece of sound and/or its visualization but in its natural form, sound is dynamic in nature, and thus I wanted to demonstrate this juxtaposition in a creative way.”

The presented image is only one part of the experimental study, what you see above is a physical rendition of the digital visualiSations created using an automatic generator through Google’s Chrome Music Lab.

From the digital images, that inspired the idea of ‘folding sound’, with reference to origami artist Jeremy Shafer’s techniques that I followed, the aim was to showcase what a language could ‘look’ like.

Shafer’s techniques on perfoRmative origami demonstrate the malleability of paper as a material and to explore the craft, I chose origami as an analogy to the rhythm that lies within bOth sound and paper as a material. One, intangible and the other tangible. This study I believe bridges the gap between the two as they complement each other.

The origami piece comes closest to the digital visualiSations in my opinion, but further trials are in progress.

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DPS—SIP—EXPO—2022 // DPS self-initiated projects (SIPs) have been an opportunity for UAL LCC London DPS students to express themselves via their personal projects and wider creative endeavours over the course of their DPS year.