Wild Animal Sounds + Math = Psychedelic Visual Renderings
Minke whale/Balaenoptera acutorostrata
Hoffman's Woodpecker/Melanerpes hoffmannii
Vermiculated Screech-Owl/Otus vermiculatus
Humpback whale/Megaptera novaeangliae
Rissos dolphin/Grampus griseus
Minke whale/Balaenoptera acutorostrata
Risso's dolphin/Grampus griseus
Bee Hummingbird/Mellisuga helenae
Baird's Trogon/Trogon bairdii
Blue-crowned Manakin/Pipra coronata
Vermiculated Screech-Owl/Otus guatemalae
The images Mark Fischer makes for his Aguasonic Acoustics project are visually mesmerizing, like something you might find in a black-light room at the back of a smokeshop.
These images, however, weren’t created to enhance your high. They’re part of an art project where Fischer takes animal sounds — mainly whales, dolphins and birds — and processes them through software he wrote to turn them into pictures.
He calls his images “pictures” or “photos” because he thinks the approach is very similar to photography. Both capture raw data, be it sound or light, and use that data to make a particular visual representation.
“The methodology is definitely photographic,” he says.
Usually animal sounds are represented visually with spectograms, which are graphs of sound waveforms. Fischer’s software uses a mathematical procedure called a wavelet because he thinks it’s a more robust way to visually analyze sound. It’s more robust, he says, because wavelets can simultaneously zoom in on details in the sound while still representing the overall pattern of the data, whereas a spectogram has to choose either detail or big picture and can’t do both.
When Fischer first turns the sound into a wavelet it’s not a mandala-like image. Instead it’s more of a typical graph with an X and Y axis. What Fischer’s software does is take the graph like a piece of string, and form it into a circle. The data is still there, but it’s been made into something more compelling to look at.
“The circle is just the art,” he says.
On the science side, Fischer is a strong proponent of wavelets and thinks spectograms are an antiquated way of studying animal sounds. In fact he’s put so much work into studying wavelets that it got him a job with the Navy.
A program manager at a Navy facility on the east coast saw some of his work at a presentation about whales in Alaska and hired him as part of a contract to find Beaked whales. These animals make impulsive sounds, or sounds that are shorter in duration, and harder to analyze using spectograms. Fischer says wavelets are more suited because of the their ability to pinpoint shorter duration sounds that spectograms don’t see.
Dean Hawthorne, a research associate in the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology says he’s seen Fischer’s work and thinks using wavelets is probably a better way to find Beaked whales. But he warns that trying to pit spectograms against wavelets is probably the wrong approach.
For him, spectograms are still valuable tools for visualizing other kinds of animal noises that last longer. He says it’s also easier for humans to read and recognize a spectogram and they’re still more universally used.
“It’s a mater of choice and it really depends on which representation better portrays the information you’re after,” he says.
The animal sounds that Fischer uses are gathered from a variety of sources. Sometimes he asks researchers to share their work and sometimes he gathers his own sounds if he has access. At one point he tried to record insect noises but says the audio files didn’t make for very interesting art.
When he prints the photos they’re often huge — four feet by eight. He says the software he built can mine an enormous amount of data from an audio file so there’s enough information to go big.
“There is extraordinary detail in there and a lot to show,” he says.