Nigel Stanford - Solar Echoes (2014)

Solar Echoes is the name of a double album by an ambient electronic artist named Nigel Stanford, who is a native New Zealander and now lives in New York. A few days ago he released a video for a single from the album named “Cymatics”. “Cymatics” is the name for the science of visualizing audio frequencies. For the video, Stanford and the video’s director Shahir Daud created a series of “experiments” designed to show visual representations of the music.

They assembled an assortment of devices that create imagery in response to sound frequencies, including a Chladni Plate, which vibrates in response to sounds played through a speaker, causing grains of sand on the plate to arrange themselves into various patterns and shapes; a Hose Pipe; a Speaker Dish (filled with frozen vodka); Ferro Fluid; a Plasma Ball; a Ruben’s Tube; and — for the finale of the video — a Tesla Coil.

Now here’s an especially interesting aspect of this project: The video was filmed before the music was composed. In the case of all those science experiments, Stanford, Daud, and their crew found tones that would create the kind of imagery they were looking for, and then Stanford composed music that incorporated those tones — and the music became the single, “Cymatics”.

Tracklist:

01. Solar Echoes
02. Entropy
03. The Edge
04. Cymatics
05. Sea of Tranquility
06. The Watchers
07. Aurora
08. Deep Space
09. Far Centaurus
10. Dark Sun