Sound Bath for the News

Anjali Nair, Graphic Design MFA, 2020

Anjali Nair is a graphic designer from New Delhi, India who is interested in exploring immersive ways in which information can be packaged and consumed. Anjali believes that humor can be an active catalyst for critical inquiry. With this approach, she strives to use visual communication as a tool to challenge the standards of normalcy.


Project Overview

In Sound Bath for News, Anjali Nair focuses on the recent amplification of the aural, tonal and visual volume of primetime news in India. Its current visual landscape consists of urgent, loud, anxiety-inducing graphics that can only be described as outfoxing the Fox. In between shouting matches, racing news tickers and blazing headlines, how much information gets imparted as opposed to anxiety, is questionable. Anjali explores the use of a sound bath, a westernized version of a meditation technique using Himalayan singing bowls that become very popular in the United States, to calm the news. 



Process

With the purpose of calming the news, I started building a hypothetical sound bath or a meditation bowl that would work as a controller for the news graphics. Taking references from crystal meditation bowls, I started building a prototype. It was created on Rhino and 3-D printed in parts. A circuit was built using CircuitPython to integrate hall effects sensors and a neo pixel ring that was set up into the bowl. By embedding a magnet into a traditional pestle, it would create the magnetic field that the sensors react to. Using processing, code was built in so it would now react to hall effect sensors set up in the bowl that emits light along with its movement while successively changing the video playing on the screen.



Presentation


Learn More


Creative Process Journal
Portfolio
Contact: anair@mica.edu


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