Visual Art

by Marta Pan is located in the sculpture garden of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands.

A replica of the sculpture was laser-scanned and a triangulation of the surface was created. This triangulation allows the visualization and the evolution of the sculpture, as well as the computation of its characteristic frequencies.

The sculpture evolves under mean curvature flow. At any time, the surface is colored according to the lowest three non-constant eigenmodes of the Laplace-Beltrami operator.

Using the 50 lowest eigenmodes of the Laplace-Beltrami operator of the surface, a characteric sound of the sculpture is generated. In its basic form, the base and the hood are each "plucked" right upon their separation, and the evolution of the vibrations that result from this plucking are computed.

Below you find one example sound file, and the final song of the sculpture. Note that unlike musical instruments, the sculpture's surface is by no means created to generate a pleasant sound. Or physically said: the overtones of the vibrational modes are far from having harmonic ratios.

• The sound of the sculpture's hood: sound_hood.wav (3.7MB).
  When listening to the sound, note that you can hear a pinch-off (a topology change) that happens after 126 evolution frames in the video (and at 00:10 in the sound file).

• The sculpture's song: sound_floating_song.aiff (30MB).
  This sound file was played every 15 minutes in one corner of the exhibition. It is a mix, composed of the characteristic sounds of the surface's connected components, when being "plucked" at various positions. The final mixing was done by Jane Philbrick (MIT CAVS).