Impressionistic techniques applied in sound art & design

Sound art and design collectively refer to the process of specifying, acquiring, manipulating or generating sonic elements to evoke emotion and environment. Sound is used to convey the intentions, emotions, spirit or aura of a story, performance, or sonic installation. Sound connects unique aural environments, creating an immersive experience via mood and atmosphere. Impressionistic techniques such as Impasto, Pointillism, Sgraffito, Stippling introduced by 19th-century painters captured the essence of their subject in more vivid compositions, exuding authentic movements and atmosphere. This thesis applied impressionistic techniques using sound art and design to project specific mood and atmosphere responses among listeners. Four unique sound textures, each representing a technique from Impressionism, and a fifth composite sound texture were created for this project. All five sound textures were validated as representative of their respective Impressionistic technique. Only sonic Pointillism matched its emotive intent. This outcome supports the research question that sound art and design can be used to direct listeners’ mood and atmosphere responses. Partnering Impressionistic principles with sound art and design offers a deeper palette to sonically deliver more robust, holistic soundscapes for amplifying an audience’s listening experience. This project provides a foundation for future explorations and studies in applying cross-disciplinary artistic techniques with sound art and design or other artistic endeavors

Onaism: An Artistic Model of Yoruba Civilization in Nigeria

This paper focuses on Ona stylistic tendency as an artistic model of Yoruba civilization in Nigeria. The quest to carve an identity led to series of experiments with diverse motifs and idioms in order to create art works reflecting our traditional setting. The Ona artistic movement is one of the many fruits or harvest emanating from the natural synthesis theory of the  late nineteen fifties. It is the intention of the writer to examine its development from the modest beginning to its robust formalistic model of artistic expression. Through interviews with exponents and review of a number of literatures, it was found out that the Ona movement has to a large extentfacilitated the crystallization of Nigerian visual art. The younger generation of Yoruba artists is inclined to revive Yoruba artforms, motifs and philosophy through constant experimentation with local materials, patterns and imagesrooted in modern styles. Through the use of this idiom, the Yoruba artists have carved an image for themselves by projecting Ona art as a formalisticmodel of artistic expression in Nigeria and the world at large.Keywords: Ona, Ornament, Pattern Motif, Desig

Generative Image Dynamics

We present an approach to modeling an image-space prior on scene dynamics. Our prior is learned from a collection of motion trajectories extracted from real video sequences containing natural, oscillating motion such as trees, flowers, candles, and clothes blowing in the wind. Given a single image, our trained model uses a frequency-coordinated diffusion sampling process to predict a per-pixel long-term motion representation in the Fourier domain, which we call a neural stochastic motion texture. This representation can be converted into dense motion trajectories that span an entire video. Along with an image-based rendering module, these trajectories can be used for a number of downstream applications, such as turning still images into seamlessly looping dynamic videos, or allowing users to realistically interact with objects in real pictures.Comment: Project website: http://generative-dynamics.github.i