Benjamin Outram

Prints are available for purchase from my Etsy shop, or please get in touch through my contact page if you can’t see the one you like on there.

These photographs were taken at the Universities of Oxford and Leeds, both during my time as a PhD student, and more recently. They are part of a project to document the beauty of liquid crystals and their science in a forthcoming book published with the Institute of Physics that I am currently writing.

If you would like to use these images for educational purposes please feel free to do so. For any other purpose, please feel free to contact me.

Video footage was also used for a music video in collaboration with Max Cooper.

Some additional older photos can be found at my liquid crystal flickr page here. I have also put up my entire unsorted collection of liquid crystal photos from my PhD research time, so that anyone can use them, for example, for textures for 3D objects, creatures and environments, art projects, illustrations, etc. Here is a demo of their use in 3D environments.

Now available on iPhone/iPad! Goto the App Store now!

Join the MusicPaint community and share your creations!

Music painting imagines what music would look like if it were paintings and art.  By mapping sound frequencies to light frequencies, sound is turned to color, as in some of my other projects.  I have always loved painting, so now I have combined paint and sound!

Click the promo video to the left.  iOS, Mac and Windows versions can be downloaded below:

Download iPhone/iPad version!

Download Mac version!

Download Windows version!

This project follows on from my other sound visualisation related projects.  To create an entirely new audio-visual experience, I have teamed up with friends and producers James Le Roux, Venaccio, Flights of Helios, and Haruna Fushimi to produce a virtual environment filled with minimal tech beats, spacey rock, upbeat melodies and heart-pounding trance.

Key advancements are the separation of synths, percussion, bass, kicks, FX and guitar tracks to produces more meaningful visualisation.  

A unique "Orbital Mode" is used to give unprecedented observational and navigational control to the VR user, creating an experience impossible in reality.

The visualisation is essentially a graphical representation of the sound data, with time mapped to position, loudness to size and frequency to colour.

The user can pause the music and freeze the visualisation, so that they can look closely at the sound data from any angle like a freeze-motion shot out of The Matrix.

The demo shown here is essentially an expression of how we can map our senses in new ways for new media paradigms.  

NEW: Available on iPhone/iPad on the App Store NOW!

NEW: Free Version no also available!!

Join the Matrix Music Visualizer Facebook community and Like the page!

As well as real-time sound visualisation for music and art, this project is also being explored within the context of virtual reality (see other projects here and here, and download apps here).  Any visualisation process should be driven by an understanding of how humans perceive sound and light, and so here I combine data on human sensitivities to sound and light frequencies to generate an intuitive and natural synesthesia interaction between the user and herself and other users through technology mediated environments. 

I did some research into the effect of crossed-sense modalities on presence in virtual reality, click here.

These images are made using a natural algorithm for turning pitch into colour, and are the visualisations of songs from a range of genres.  The first image is 'simple things' by Massive Attack, for example, the second from Ott's amazing album Mir.  

I designed the algorithm with human perception in mind.  The sound is analysed using a Fourier transform, or FFT, which gives you the frequency spectrum of the sound over time.  This spectrum is then mapped onto a visible spectrum, of light, and this spectrum is then multiplied by the sensitivities of the three light-cones in your eye.  These sensitivity profiles were measured from volunteers in the 1930s, and from these sensitivities it is possible to determine what colour we would perceive, if the sound were actually light!  

This technology is used to create real-time visualisations which I have used in a variety of contexts, including right now in research into interaction modalities in virtual reality environments.  You can have a go now at looking at the colour of your own voice and music by downloading my free app on Android and iOS. Search "benjamin outram" in the app store, or follow the links below:

For Android

For iPhone/iPad

If you take some ink and a page, a brush and your mind, and an hour or two, that's all you need for a simple place to be calm and explore the creative space between your thoughts.

Playing with acrylic is fun isn't it?  I like the way it feels and smells.  

Some miscellaneous experiments mixing brush work and digital manipulation, photography, glitch, and technology.

Liquid crystals exhibit beautiful textures that can provide a bizarre and out-of-this-world feel to 3D environments.  All the textures shown in this demo are available here.  Please use them in your own projects and let me know what you are doing!

The most beautiful images are showcased over on the liquid crystal page here.