Wavelengths — Senior Design Project

Wavelengths was my senior design project at UConn. It was completely self-directed and lasted an entire semester, and was probably the most involved project I've ever completed (and one of my favorites).

I was (and still am) really drawn to studying sound & music and how it could be represented by visual design. I'm also really interested in design systems, and how specific rules are applied to inputs to produce a desired output. I was further fascinated by the organic nature of sound & music and wanted to see how sound vibrations could be translated into visual displays.

This led me to discover & explore cymatics, which is the study of sound wave phenomena & their visual representations. For my project, I created a crude "machine" (if you can call it that) out of a solo cup, balloon, mirror piece, speaker, & laser. And when the speaker played music, the vibrations would project themselves visually on the wall with the help of the laser.

This allowed me to produce organic visuals from the vibrations of the sound with no human interpretation, which was amazing to me.

The only issue was that I had no idea how to create a design project from it. No matter what I did, nothing felt truly complete. I ended up using my homemade cymatics machine to record & project different people's voices on the wall saying the same prompts, showcasing the difference in visual displays from person to person, regardless of them saying the exact same things.

See examples below of different people saying the same letters of the alphabet:

I used my findings to create a unique visual alphabet for each person's voice. I also used the project to make a commentary on humanity, perspectives, & language—we may say the same things, but our vibrations are all different & unique in their own way.

See below examples of "letters" in one visual alphabet: