No, not the ocean waves rolling and clapping, ebullient in white summer sunshine.
I’m thinking about sound waves.
That’s not entirely an odd thought for me, proud mother of an acoustic engineer. As a girl, great fun was shared with my dad, also an engineer, as we played with his oscilloscope. And wasn’t it me who sparked the passion for physics in my young family, even if I my depth of knowledge in the sciences is fairly basic? Physics turns me on. Always has. I poured daily over articles about physics as I kept my three little boys from hurting themselves… or each other. Physics, astronomy, and travel kept my mind entertained as I watched my towheaded munchkins play boy games in the back yard. Coping with tired, belligerent children became easier as long as Condé Nast Traveller, old National Geographics, and the occasional Science magazines were within reach. The way sounds move and the patterns of those movements flow into my day dreams like a paint-filled brush sweeping across a canvas.
Scientists and engineers observe sound through read-outs from acoustic measuring devices. There’s plenty of information out there about acoustics. I didn’t have to spend much time searching “sound waves” on Google before striking gold with a YouTube video called The Art of Sound. Wow, wow, wow!! Apparently many others consider sound in a visual way. There’s a simple illustration of sound waves at http://www.fi.edu.
For the techies out there, my son Tim Johnson provides us with a very simplified explanation of his professional knowledge of sound waves. “First, we know there is a certain amount of pressure in the air, or else we’d be in a vaccum like space. This is called atmospheric pressure. Next, when we think about sound or a noise we just heard, what we’re actually talking about is called sound pressure. There are other things called sound intensity and sound power, for example, but those are not perceived by the average person. One more basic background concept is waves. A sound wave looks like a sine wave [see illustration above]. If we follow a wave, we see that it oscillates above and below some equilibrium point, right? So, sound waves (in air) are very small fluctuations in the air pressure above and below the atmospheric pressure. Not enough that we can normally feel, obviously, but enough that we can hear (as long as the frequency of the waves is within our range of hearing). Humans can hear sounds between frequencies of about 20 Hertz and 20,000 Hz.” Okay, that’s the science of sound. [Good job, Tim!]
Now, how about the art of sound? Boiled down, I think about the art of sound as patterns flowing invisibly around me. These waves surround me as I walk through the woods. The trill of bird songs, emitting short, fast little waves of sound, mixed with the background sound of my breathing and walking through dry leaves… how can I express the beauty of this daily orchestration of my life? That’s my puzzle as I begin to design a series of art quilts exploring this theme. The first sketches began as abstract representations of the confluence of these waves in air. I’m also playing with the vibration of materials as these waves pass through them. Of course, I have many ideas about living reactions to sound: a dog with a cocked ear, a mother whispering in her baby’s ear, the undulating crowd at a rock concert. Photographing these images, now housed in my imagination, would be fairly easy. But how do I represent these with fabric? That’s my work for now. Do you have any ideas?
