Category Archives: sound design

When the Perot Museum of Nature and Science opens this weekend, the state-of-the-art facility will feature the work of Arts and Technology students from The University of Texas at Dallas.

Derrick Dugan (left) and Charles McCormick were among students in the digital music production course.

During the last year, a group of undergraduates created soundscapes for the museum, giving the students hands-on experience in the field of sound design.

“This is a typical project that comes out of ATEC in that it connects art, science and technology in a creative dialogue and also contributes to positioning the University as a pertinent partner with major cultural institutions in the Metroplex,” said Dr. Frank Dufour, a professor of sound design who led the digital music production course. “Students were given a wonderful opportunity to express themselves in a professional environment in which their creativity was welcome.”

Dr. Frank Dufour

The students worked closely with Dufour and Roxanne Minnish, a UT Dallas sound design instructor, composer and project manager, and with museum officials to refine their designs throughout the semester.

“Dr. Dufour was conceptual in the way he taught, but also practical and logical. He is inspiring as a teacher,” said Josh Casey, a senior who worked on the project. “He guided us and gave us advice and challenged students to think about what the soundscapes should really represent.”

Located north of downtown Dallas near Victory Park, the 180,000-square-foot museum features five floors of public space with 11 permanent exhibit halls, including a children’s museum and a hall designed to host traveling exhibitions. The museum opens to the public on Saturday, Dec. 1.

The digital music production class worked on sound designs for the 11 exhibit halls, which include the T. Boone Pickens Life Then and Now Hall, Being Human Hall, Discovering Life Hall, Rose Hall of Birds, Sports Hall and the Texas Instruments Engineering and Innovation Hall, among others.

The students worked together, collaborating on certain designs and critiquing each other’s projects throughout the semester.

“At first, when people criticize your work you may be offended, but I learned to become grateful for criticism – I learned a lot about the creative process and how to collaborate and bring new ideas together,” Casey said.

Each design required specific sounds that would enhance the educational and artistic quality of the exhibit. For example, there are heartbeats for baselines in the Being Human Hall soundscape and sweeping notes that rise and fall – like a flight pattern – in the Rose Hall of Birds design.

“Collaborating with UT Dallas on this project is just one of the ways that the Perot Museum seeks to enhance the visitor experience through highly immersive exhibits that cater to diverse learning styles,” said Steve Hinkley, vice president of programs at the Museum. “The students’ work demonstrates not only their dedication to innovation, but is a testament to visitors that the intersection of art and science is all around us.”

Frank and Kristin Lee Dufour and two Arts and Technology graduate students will discuss how they used choreography and lighting to interpret movement in their experimental interactive sound installation, Acoustic Shadows, an Exploration of the Sense of Space.

Acoustic Shadows is an audiovisual immersive and interactive installation that depicts Orpheus surrounded by shadows of the underworld consumed by the shadow of his wife, Eurydice.

The Dufours and the cast and production team will discuss the immersive qualities in the work and the use of choreography and lighting to interpret movement in space. They are interested in exposing the question of unity and identity of a work of art, as it integrates multiple individual talents into a single expression.

The production team includes graduate student Sherri Balch Segovia, choreographer and Djakhangir Zakhidov, filmmaker.

The discussion will take place Thursday, May 17, 6:30-8:30 p.m. in The Center for Creative Connections Theater at the Dallas Museum of Art.

The School of Arts and Humanities opens its spring season by examining the relationship between sound and art with the mixed-media exhibit Sonic Architectonic.

Parts by exhibit artist Derrick Buisch is made in oil paint, enamel, spray paint on canvas, wood panel and multi-density fiberboard.

Curated by visual arts faculty member Lorraine Tady, the exhibit features both local and national artists who work directly with noise or frequency, examining what is heard or felt through sound waves, and some who work with images that suggest sound. Other artists in the exhibit anticipate our relationship to sound by addressing our expectations and cognitive reflexes.

“In contemporary art, sound is a medium used as a separate tool, or is intertwined with other mediums,” said Tady. “Some artists infuse their own open, hybrid visual forms and multimedia explorations with sound. This exhibit considers these approaches and more.”

Artists utilizing real sound with their visual works or as their artwork include Jill Auckenthaler, who, in collaboration with Sarah Phillips, will display What My Schedule Sounds Like. The work is both an instrumental score for an atonal sound piece and a watercolor and graphite work on paper.

Brad Tucker is creating Bagdad Bass Club, an interactive sound and object installation that combines videotaped music performance, customized audio equipment, handmade plastic records, ambient music and thumping intermittent bass sounds.

96-Tears no. 3 by John Pomara, professor of visual arts in the School of Arts and Humanities

Dr. Frank Dufour, assistant professor of sound design at UT Dallas, and adjunct art professor Stephen Lapthisophon, will, in separate works of art, direct sound into the gallery to inhabit and transform the architectural space of the gallery. Lapthisophon interprets Karl Marx through a disembodied voice reminiscent of German lieder. Dufour collaborates with David Searcy and Nancy Rebal to create an interactive soundscape alluding to world peace.

Paul Slocum offers his iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch app Magic Carpet. Visitors are invited to install the free app “carpet lite” to experience the hypnotic and meditative graphics in synchronization with the app’s generative music synthesizer.

Artists who will study sound in various visual ways using painting, drawing, and sculpture include John Pomara, professor of visual arts in the School of Arts and Humanities. Included are computer ink jet drawings by Robert Ortega, who is interested in patterns and “how to graphically relate light wavelength to audio frequency,” and Diane Fitch’s realist paintings of casual living room musicians.

what my schedule sounds like is both an instrumental score for an atonal sound piece and a watercolor and graphite work on paper. The work was created by Jill Auckenthaler in collaboration with Sarah Phillips.

The show opens with a reception on Friday, Jan. 27 from 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. in the Visual Arts Building. Visiting artist Brad Tucker will share a lecture of his work Friday Jan. 27at 10 a.m. in AS 1.116. The group exhibit will on display until Feb. 18, 2012.

Using the ancient myth of Orpheus, video projection and three-dimensional sound, a UT Dallas professor is examining the relationship of sound to perception of movement in Acoustic Shadows, an Exploration of the Sense of Space.

The Acoustic Shadows exhibit was a collaboration between Dr. Frank Dufour and his wife, Kristin Lee Dufour.

Acoustic Shadows is an audio-visual immersive and interactive installation that depicts Orpheus surrounded by shadows of the underworld consumed by the shadow of his wife, Eurydice.

In the myth, the gifted and musical Orpheus travels to the underworld after his wife dies to beg Hades to allow his wife to return to earth. After violating a condition made by Hades, Orpheus loses his wife forever.

Dr. Frank Dufour worked on the project with his wife, Kristin Lee Dufour, a creative art director and international consultant for visual communications.

“The viewer is enveloped in a multisensory, reactive system that actually ‘listens’ for changes in the environment generated by your presence and movement,” said Dufour, assistant professor of sound design in UT Dallas’ Arts and Technology program.

The audio-visual installation depicts Orpheus of ancient legend surrounded by shadows of the underworld and consumed by the shadow of his wife, Eurydice.

“This results in noticeable changes to the sound and projected images. Your body reflects and absorbs sound waves to create the auditory manifestation or form of silent movement, which, in this context, is termed ‘Acoustic Shadows.’”

The exhibit is currently on display in The Center for the Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art until April 2012. Acoustic Shadows made its debut at The Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence, France, earlier this year.

More about Dr. Dufour’s research is available in SoundEffects, a journal on sound and sound experience.

On April 15, 2011, French new media philosopher Bernard Stiegler stepped into the Arts and Technology building to a room jam-packed with professionals, educators and students awaiting his arrival.

Thanks to Stiegler’s long time friendship with sound design pro Professor Frank Dufour, he happened to be passing through Dallas and agreed to give a talk entitled Forming and Deforming Attention.

The talk centered on the discussion of the importance of education in early development of attentional forms.

Dr. Stiegler is currently the Director of the Georges Pompidou Institute of Research and Innovation in Paris, which aims to anticipate changes in human behavior brought about by the evolution of technology.

He also holds an assistant professorship at the Goldsmith College in London and at the University of Compiegne.