The sounds create objects for The Pärnu City Orchestra
Lissajous figures origami / Harmonics. Kaleidophone figures origami / Octave
The visuals for the 29th season are created by Anne Rudanovski, an Estonian sculptor and art professor.
Visual inspiration
Lissajous figures origami
In the mid-nineteenth century, the French mathematician Jules Lissous conducted an experiment: he found that if you put a small mirror on the end of a sound arm and shone a beam of light on it, you could make the vibrations visible on a dark screen. A small vertical line was formed when the sound beam was struck, and when it was quickly passed on to another mirror, a horizontal sine wave was formed. Lissajous wondered what would happen if, instead of reflecting the wave laterally, the second mirrored horn was placed at right angles to the first to create lateral movement. He discovered that sound beams with relative frequencies in a simple relationship produced the beautiful shapes now known as Lissajous shapes. For example, an octave is visually like infinity, or an eight. I take the shapes that arise when listening to music as my starting point and try to fold the flowing frequencies into space by exploiting the organic possibilities of paper (a man-made plant material). Origami is characterised by purity, brightness, rhythm and harmony. A dramatic note is provided by the play of light and shadow. The result is a series of paper sculptures of visualized sounds, Lissajou's origami shapes expressing different musical emotional frequencies, carried by the Pärnu City Orchestra.
Kaleidophone figures origami
The series of origami sculptures based on the moving optical harmonic oscillations of the "philosophical toy" kaleidophone. The mathematics of music becomes a pure, sincere and emotionally charged origami sculpture, where each harmony has a distinctive aesthetic character.
The kaleidophone is an instrument for the study of harmonics, invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1827. The simplest version of the instrument consists of a steel rod with one end fixed to a brass base and a tiny silvered glass helmet at the other loose end. A surprising number of patterns emerged, depending on how the steel rod was struck and then 'swung', for example, with a violin bow. The patterns were made visible on a screen in front of a kaleidophone using a spotlight. Wheatstone called his invention a "philosophical toy". Indeed, when one delves into the nature of the designs, one is struck by the depth of their simple beauty.
