The Sound of a Drop—A Collection of Sounds & Abstracted Images of Falling Objects.
Project Goal: To create a public (or widely accessible) collection of gathered images, materials, sounds, objects, based on a randomly selected source material.
Randomly Selected Source Material: The Splash of a Drop, by Professor A. M. Worthington; 1895; London.
The images above are extracted from The Splash of a Drop, and jumpstarted my deep-dive into collecting images of things dropping, falling, slipping, dripping, collapsing, leaving, decreasing, etc.
Collect, collect, collect!
Below are is a photo of ~50 collected images surrounding the theme of "dropping," from literal to figurative & abstract.
Collect → Organize
Once all these images were gathered, I began to examine the relationships between all of them beyond it being sourced from the notion of dropping. Below is a scan of my brainstorming for how to organize these images after receiving feedback and discussing ideas from peers.
I decided to thematically organize my images based on the sound that they elicit. Things that drop are often associated with a loud noise—BANG! CLASH! CRACK!—that can often be imagined when viewing an image. I decided to Keep all the images that elicited some sense of noise, then Discard images that do not from this collection. After organizing these images to Keep and Discard, I heavily annotated the printed images to begin to brainstorm different ways that I can begin to make this collection public.
Left: Keep in Collection. Right: Discard from Collection.
After synthesizing these thoughts, I noticed that a lot of my annotations were words describing the noises that I could hear from these images—all expressed through onomatopoeias. To further explore how this idea could take life, I created more "finalized" and intentionally designed posters of the above versions, including my annotations and citations for every image.
Left: Keep in Collection. Right: Discard from Collection. Posters printed 24 x 36 inches.
Because this Collection has progressed to be more about the sound that the images represent rather than the images themselves, I applied a halftone effect to represent the actual sound and vibrations that these images evoke. Below are a few trials of different effects before I finally selected the halftone. After feedback from my peers & more research, I found that the halftone-dot most successfully represented the notion of noise, vibration, and sound waves without being overtly cliche.
Left to right: Original, Line, Diamond, Cross, Dot
Sketches leading up to final web experience
The Final Collection
After producing the finalized posters with annotations, I created the following web experience for individuals to access my collection of images, organized by the onomatopoeia that it most closely resembles. I split up my images into the following onomatopoeia categories: Ahhhhh, Bam, Crack, Drip, Fizz, Plup, Plung, Splash, and Whoosh. Below is a high-fidelity mock of the final web experience. The sound included in the video is a compilation of noises related to drops, collected from the Public BBC Sound Library.
I also printed various posters of the images with the applied halftone-dot effect; below is a gif of these posters.
As this was produced for a class, the below is a peak into the exhibit-like setting that I crafted to present this project.
