Are your eyes bored today? Look at this right now. It’s a computer animation by computer artist Daniel Sierra, and it will mesmerise you, if only for a few minutes.
Sierra just got his MFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts, and Oscillate was his thesis project. He was inspired by the motion of sine waves, upon which he built a tapestry of colour and sound:
The concept of universal building blocks that can be assembled to form complex structures is something I find very exciting and alluring. Sound follows this concept in that any sound, for example a snare drum or a human voice, can be deconstructed as the summation of varying sine waves; hence making sine waves the building blocks of sound so to speak. This concept, which comes from the Fourier Series (named after Joseph Fourier) was the inspiration for my thesis, “Oscillate”.
Sierra used Houdini to compose the animation, Reason to create the music, Nuke for compositing, and After Effects for the final render. It’s pretty amazing that the sound and visuals were all the work of one person. [Daniel Sierra via Faith is Torment]