So after my tutorial on tuesday, I was challenged immensely to A: find out the purpose of my artwork I intend to make, and B: somehow prove that it can be done. Here I am now showing you my first experiments generating sin and cosine waves using an open source audio generation software called PureData (or Pd for short)
after several hours of playing around and using tutorials I managed to come up with this nifty contraption (some of which I am still getting my head around, so bear with me. In the presentation I will also try to do my best to explain some of what is going on here.
I'll start from the top down. The sliders basically control the volume of the frequencies. you can slide these up and down to regulate how loud your sound is. The numbers (101 and 158) represent the Hz of the frequency. e.g. 101 represents 101 Hz and 158 represents 158 Hz.
The 'Phasor' item is basically our playback engine, and creates our oscilloscope. The 'dac' item at the bottom stands for 'digital to analogue converter) and is the sound output. The Sin and Cos values are our wavelengths we are using to generate the sound. Their levels are both controlled by the frequency item and the volume slider as mentioned before. The object next to the 'dac' object is how we visualise our sine and cosine waves and how we get the neat pattern.
The values of the sine are also modifiable, as shown in the diagrams below.
![]() |
| Before |
![]() |
| After |
This is just one way I can represent the sound present as light. These are only preliminary experiments and really only proof of concepts. But as ypu can see there is almost infinite room for experimentation, and the simplicity of the generated light gives one a freedom of control over the sound generated but also the light. It explicitly shows how the two are intrinsicly I need to discuss things over with tutors and also find someone more familiar with this program or other programs to work out how to create and control the shapes more accurately.
I would love to create some kind of interactive art piece where two individuals could use sliders or a midi controller to modify the pitch, frequency and values of the sin waves to essentially collaborate, experiment to create their own unique patterns together. I want to portray the unique relationship we share with light and sound, and I want the individuals to interact with it in one of its most primal levels.













