When I was little I used to wake up to hearing someone playing piano. I would walk downstairs and nobody would be there. I have always heard melodies constantly playing in my mind. I have always seen vivid visual images. I have always wanted to get them out of mind. These experiences for me feel very immersive. If I close my eyes I can see and hear things to the point I feel the experience all over my body. I have always wanted to share this feeling with other people.

I had a solid brainstorming session, with my good friend Olivia, further working on the story development for my thesis project. We got into a deep discussion of resonance and I realized that resonance is what I should be focusing on over harmonic motion. While both are related concepts, resonance builds on harmonic motion as an expression of the relationships and connections between frequencies. I was reminded of a poem I once wrote:

I met you and we resonated.  
Our frequencies matched.
Constructive interference 
The amplitude now your wave plus mine.
Do you feel it.
The way the energy soared. 
When we walked into the room. 
Together.
In perfect time.

I question how I can express this concept visually. If two people staring at eachother from different worlds can see and recognize the connection that they share, how do others percieve this? I now must reference another statement that I wrote:

There are moments when the wall between our paths becomes transparent and we see 
each other standing there.  We reach out and for one brief second in time we 
connect and for one brief moment I am reminded that I’m not alone.

Sometimes in life there are people that you meet, that make life seem so much more grounded. They remind you that it's not you who is the crazy one, but the world that does not know how to find a place for you. This piece is just as much about connection as anything else. I can't forget about humanity.

Rationality is viewed as a virtue in our society. It is a concept that most strive to achieve in their interactions in life. We often find ourselves, when engaging with decisions, attempting to move towards the more rational choice; however, there are some feelings that are so completely irrational we can’t help but feel them. Where do these feelings have a place? Why do these feelings pull us in the directions that they do?

I have never been one to strictly move within rational space. I have many times gone for the irrational choice because it just felt right. Yet I’m older now. I’ve seen what some of those irrational choices can lead to. And I don’t regret them. I never would, but the irrational choice is usually not the easiest choice.

It’s safer to live in a rational world. With rationality comes logic and definition and a foreseen conclusion. But this world isn’t rational. We don’t live in the scientific model that we have constructed. We live in a world where things can’t always be predicted. We create rational models but we live in an irrational world.

How have we defined what is reasonable? If being rational is being reasonable then what is reason? Where did we decide that certain actions or thoughts were reasonable while others were not? Being rational is being influenced by reason and not emotions??? Why are emotions not reasonable? When did we decide that emotions were unreasonable or rather irrational? Followed by that being rational is being of sound mind otherwise known as sane. Is this to say that being influenced by emotion is not a sane way to interact and engage with life?

I find myself questioning rationality vs irrationality as I attempt to merge not only certain elements of science and art, but also the sides of myself that are more artistic and scientific. The left and the right brain, as some may say. When integrating subjects there is always the challenge of finding the ways to communicate the connections that to you are so apparent, but there is also the challenge of balancing your own emotional being on two separate planes of existence.

As an artist I find myself becoming lost in the outer reaches of my own reflections and thought. There are times when I find it hard to return back to Earth. Time becomes a variant and space dissolves. I feel deeply emotional and connected to an ether otherwise invisible.

As a scientist I have both feet planted firmly on the ground. Every detail of every task is adamantly apparent. I observe things as they logically occur and refuse to act on emotion without fully analyzing the outcomes of my choices. In this space I become a highly functional member of society, but I can’t help feeling there is something I am missing out on.

So as I devise my story I feel a love triangle between humanity, science, and art will need to be explored. There is a struggle that exists when you operate on both planes, yet this struggle is what can lead you to the most innovative perceptions of life.

It’s the way you move across the room. The way you breathe. There is a solemn quiet that exudes beyond us and into time and space. The timeline of our existence breaks down. Disintegrates. You and I are left to look at each other. Maybe I should gain comfort in your smile. And I do. But there is something more beautiful in knowing that whatever we are is outside of time. We have passed beyond the furthest dimension we could imagine. So now we stand here, looking at each other. I’ve never recognized your face the way I do in this light. It glows with a solemn uncertainty that keeps me focused on every emotion that I exude. Like perspiration seeping out my pours, I seep feeling. Pure unadulterated feeling. And you. Who are you to do this to me? But I can’t resist. So I take your hand and we dance. I feel your fingers grab me with a soft intent and suddenly I am connected, the subtleties of your motion direct me from one position to the next. Never have I felt more alive. Here in this moment we infringe upon our morality of conception. We are all connected, so why do we fail to acknowledge those connections?

When I was in elementary school I attended Montessori school. The classroom was an open room with mostly floor space. There were no chairs and we would usually sit on the floor. I can still picture the layout of the space. There was a corner across from the door that allowed us entrance into the classroom. In this corner there were stacks of books. In the book corner existed a list that had many recommended readings on it. I made it a point to check off as many of these readings from this list as I could.

If you turned to your right, when in the book corner, there was one larger table with chairs. We mostly used this space to make art or any project that you were working on that required a table. Every year we would create a group art project and present it at the Boulder Art Museum. We would go on a field trip to see it. One year we created a quilt inspired by the artist Faith Ringgold. We came up with the concept as a group and then each of us created a square that was later sewn into one larger whole.

Most of the space; however, was just an open floor. Here we would sit in a circle and play music, write, study, and learn. Every morning we would start the day out by journaling in a notebook. I still have the stacks of black and white etched composition books that we would write in. It was here I learned about poetry and wrote many of my first poems. It was also here I learned about astronomy and became fascinated with the stars and the history of all the men and women who had travelled to the moon. Each subject flowed into the next. There were no lines or distinctions. The space was safe, bright, and inviting. It was in this space I began developing many of my strongest skillsets.

When I finally began attending public school I found it challenging to sit in the classroom the way they expected us to sit. The desks were uncomfortable and I found it difficult to listen to the teacher as they droned on about who knows what. I would get in trouble for doodling on my notebook, or doing my homework in class, but I still managed to get straight A’s. Mostly I was just bored. It was easy to just remember information and regurgitate it, and writing seemed pretty natural to me at that point. I don’t have many clear memories about my classes and what I learned during this time. What I do remember were my friends and the social connections I made.

When I reached college I rediscovered my passion for learning. My classes were harder, I could choose what subjects I wanted to study, and I had a big beautiful open campus to explore. I still struggled to sit in a desk ‘properly’, but for the most part I was excited and stimulated about the knowledge that was to be gained. Pretty quickly I learned that the university didn’t have a program that integrated all of the subjects that I was interested in so I devised my own program combining physics, psychology, art, and music.

I was amazed at how many people would ask me how these subjects connected. To me it was obvious. Physics was the study of optics and acoustics, psychology was sensation and perception, and art was the application of these studies. I think it is the drive to make these connections and the realization that they are not immediately apparent to everyone that makes me have the desire to create the art I wish to create.

I interviewed Tim Gulsrud who is a practicing acoustician. This means he consults architectural firms in how to design buildings to best suit the acoustic needs of the client. During our conversation while talking about using physics to understand how the sound is interacting with the physical space he said, “It gets so complicated so fast. It shows you the limitations of the physics. We might say, ‘We’ve got this figured out. We’ve got this reverberation time equation, we’ve got these axial mode calculations, it’s simple math’… But the part of the spectrum where low frequency modes really happen is up to 100 HZ, I might calculate them up to 150 maybe 200 HZ depending on the size of the room, but beyond that it gets so complicated it’s just not worthwhile. The math just breaks down. The engineer might say, well don’t worry, all you have to worry about is up to 200HZ, but as an audio engineer if you said all I have to worry about is up to 200 HZ, that right there shows you the limitations of the math and that’s cutting edge acoustics. It just becomes impractical.” I found this statement interesting as it describes the ways in which science and math can really only take us so far in our understanding of the world around us. At a certain point the tools don’t work and you have to rely on your human experience to make further decisions and analysis. How can I demonstrate the limitations of science and where we must cross into the realm of art?

Another topic we talked in depth about was the exploration of standing waves within a room. There is an experiment which involves placing a speaker at different locations in the room and exciting room modes. “Room modes are the collection of resonances that exist in a room when the room is excited by an acoustic source such as a loudspeaker. Most rooms have their fundamental resonances in the 20 Hz to 200 Hz region, each frequency being related to one or more of the room's dimension's or a divisor thereof”, says Wikepedia. You can experience these room modes by walking around the space during a time that a speaker is exciting one of the modes and at different places in the room you will hear a rise in the volume of sound and then a lowering in the volume. I am wondering what kinds of interesting artistic effects may be explored in the excitation of room modes? What can we explore in the peaks and null points?

Through this process I am recognizing themes that are arising. One word that I am feeling particularly keen towards is “Lens”. In going through this process of looking at a particular subject from the perspectives of different people within certain disciplines, I have found myself using the word “lens” to describe those perspectives. I am beginning to question how can I visualize and/or sonify this experience of looking at the concept of resonance through different lenses? What would those lenses look like? What would they be?

I have been thinking a lot the concept of time and the ways in which we perceive time in relationship to storytelling. I have become recently inspired by hypertext electronic literature and the ways in which it breaks down the normal conception of how we tell stories in a linear fashion. Hypertext is somewhat the choose your own adventure model; however, in many of the pieces I have been reading it becomes much more personal than that. In Shelly Jackson’s My Body there is intimacy to the way the story reads. It’s almost like you are within her mind and her thoughts. You can travel through her thinking in a way that traditional timelines don’t allow. How may I tell this story of Resonance seen through different lenses in a way where the timeline is broken apart, rewound, paused, and fast-forwarded? In our digital space we can do things with time that is impossible to do in our physical environment. How can I use the digital space to manipulate the timelines within my story?