Reading Response #3

to Artful Design — Chapter 3: "Visual Design"

Ethan Buck

10/15/2023

Music 256A, Stanford University

From this week's reading, I'd like to respond to Artful Design Principle 3.14, which states:

Principle 3.14: Savor Strange Design Loops

This principle discusses the act of constructing recursive loops and connections between elements in your design. This is a quality of design that I have always appreciated, but I never materialized it as a concept until now. 

I think the part that I find so intriguing about this principle is the feeling of the ‘meta.’ There is a hard-to-describe, but extremely visceral feeling that accompanies the ‘meta’ quality. To me, it feels like a loop that somehow ends differently than the start—as if you went on a hike around a lake, only to find that after completing the loop, you were in an entirely new location (perhaps this is the “strange-ness” in the loop). It matters not so much where you end up (whether it’s in a place of enlightenment, newfound understanding, plain disillusionment, or apathy), but it makes you think about the path that you took to get back to where you will start anew (#deep). 

In any case, even prior to reading this chapter, I was unconsciously attempting to incorporate a strange design loop into my visualizer. The idea for my visualizer is an old fashioned box-set TV, where the screen displays the frequency domain history, and the antennas sport the time domain. One of the inspirations for this design was the clouds visualizer that was presented in class. One aspect of this visualizer that I really liked was the use of constant background white noise to give the clouds their characteristic shape.

I really enjoyed this interplay between the audio and the physicality of the visualizer, and thus wanted a similar effect in my design. Taking inspiration from the use of white noise in the clouds visualizer, I went with a television because I wanted the white noise to make the frequency domain look like TV static. 

The more I thought about this interplay, however, the more I got turned around in my own strange design loop. As I understand it, TV static happens when a TV’s antennas receive no transmission signal and begin transmitting the extraneous signals that are in the immediate environment. These random electromagnetic waves project the infamous ‘snow’ onto the screen and flood the speakers with white noise. In my design however, this gets flipped around, as the flooding of the TV’s input with white noise is what projects the ‘snow’ onto the screen, and the antennas focus onto the signal of the input. 

The backwards nature of this design is strange, a bit confusing, and (at least for now) hardly profound. Regardless, I find this turning of tables to be somewhat cheeky, which, at this point, is the main feeling I want to instill in my audience—if I can elicit a response not unlike how someone might react to a halfway decent pun or dad-joke, I see that as a huge win. Either way, at the very least, it will reframe the relationship between TVs and sound.