About our Company
Sonik Innova
​
Sonik Innova was formed in 2017 after our patent for
animation and display techniques for music and audio
was awarded.
​
Our Mission is to pioneer innovative new methods to
animate and display music and audio for use in
entertainment, education, science, and pro audio.
​
Patent Awarded for Display & Animation of Music
Our Music Animation & Display Process is Now Patented
Patent No: US 9,704,276 B1 Granted 2017
Title: Enhancement and Display Methods for Intuitively
Read Three-Dimensional Visual Representations of Digital Audio Files
URL: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9704276B1/en
This process has numerous uses in entertainment, education, and gaming, as well as pro audio, forensic and industrial audio analysis.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Sonik Innova's Founder
​
Randy Wilson is a musician who has been immersed in the field from the age of five. Like many creative people, his interests grew in other areas; photography, graphic art, and more. Over time, he became an all around creator on the Mac and has worked for Apple. For many years, he worked for companies that used his expertise as a computer musician and synthesist to help develop products that are renowned in the music and audio industry.
Although involved in photography and graphic design for decades, he has started producing animation and digital art recently due to his development of a system to create detailed three dimensional images from music.
Animation - Film Screenings
These 3D animations of music have screened at the Athens Animation Marathon, the Hollywood Screenings Film Festival, the Berlin Flash Film Festival, the Los Angeles Cinefest, the CyberiaVR Film Festival, and the Bay Area Short Films Festival, earning three Semifinalist awards and Best Music Video for, “Fate Knocks - Beethoven’s 5th.”
Art & Photography
Randy was a finalist in Denver’s Cherry Creek Arts Festival’s “Five Years Out Challenge” supporting work that will influence art in the future. He was commissioned by Arrow Electronics to create a visual 3D portrait of the company’s symphonic corporate theme. His artwork has also been displayed at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the HUD Gallery in Ventura, CA and the Arc Gallery in San Francisco.
He is a published photographer in over a dozen magazines.
Composer & Musician
Accomplished composer, instrumentalist, and singer. Randy’s music is distributed on iTunes and through other online vendors, CDs, and a music-for-picture library, as well as used in films and videos.
Digital Audio Developer
Randy has developed a patent pending system for unique 3D displays of music and audio with numerous applications in the fields of entertainment, education, pro audio, and more. US Patent was awarded in 2017.
He’s helped develop leading edge audio and music products for Digidesign/Avid and Opcode Systems.
Personal
He has lived near San Francisco for over a dozen years with his wife and daughter after many years in Silicon Valley. He shares a birthday with Beethoven and Kandinsky.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will you be animating some newer music soon?
Yes. We need to work with multitrack recordings that allow us to portray the different instruments separately. We are contacting current musicians to collaborate and work on their multitrack recordings.
Are stereo channels represented in your artwork?
The artwork can very effectively show two or more channels. However, that creates a more complex display where detail is lost to show multiple channels. To keep these portraits simpler, the signal from both sides of the stereo pair has been combined to create a monophonic image. But the separate parts within that image are displayed with different colorations and textures so many elements of the recording can be viewed simultaneously.
Why are the volume peaks on the Treble side often shorter than on the Bass side?
With many traditional instruments aside from drums and percussion the Bass side shows fundamentals–the notes we write in music notation. The High/Treble overtones on the opposite side are usually smaller and lower than the fundamental foundation of the notes found on the Bass side.
In modern recordings drums and percussion, synthesizers, distortion, and effects add additional high frequencies and inharmonics. Loud cymbals produce hundreds of spikes that can obscure other important musical elements in the recording. For this reason those High/Treble frequencies are sometimes reduced in height or width to reveal more important underlying parts.
“Edwin Land once told me that those people who can stand at the intersection of the humanities and science, the liberal arts and technology, that intersection, are the people who can change the world.”
Steve Jobs
This video shows the notes first in Landscape Horizontal Layout , then tilts into a Lattice Vertical Layout.
3D Layouts of Music
Maps of Musical Worlds
from SOUND to SIGHT
To create the 3D images used for the animation and artwork a passage of music is analyzed for its frequency content (what we hear as the pitches and tone of the music) thousands of times. Up to one hundred thousand “slices” of the analysis are strung together to assemble a 3D terrain.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
After creating a landscape from the audio analysis, we spend hours exploring the unique, detailed terrain. Then the artistic side takes over. The technology is only a tool for the human creative process.
We work to find the best layout, angles of view, colors, textures, backgrounds, and lighting to achieve a final piece that reflects the character and spirit of the music. We try many approaches before determining the look that is best.
ART & MUSIC - the Relationship
There are many examples of composers and musicians who described music in visual terms and were inspired by works of art. And hundreds of cases of artists whose work was inspired by music. Beethoven, Liszt, Messiaen, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius, Bernstein, Varèse make up just a short incomplete list of composers who have spoken on the topic.
Here’s a quote from Messiaen on the phenomenon:
"When I hear music, I see in the mind's eye colors which move with the music. This is not imagination, nor is it a psychic phenomenon. It is an inward reality."
Synaesthesia
Kandinsky, widely considered to be the father of abstract art was inspired by music to paint the invisible. He had a condition, widely recognized today as synaesthesia.
Kandinsky was overwhelmed by the effect of synaesthesia while viewing a Wagner opera in Moscow: "I saw all my colors in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me."
Later, as he developed his thoughts and theories on the relationship between art and music he filled his work with shapes and colors that would “sing together.” He wrote,“Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings.”
The list of artists, musicians, and other creative types who have experienced synaesthesia number in the hundreds; from Van Gogh to Van Halen.
More from Beethoven on his Vision of Music:
“I change many things, discard, and try again until I am satisfied. Then, however, there begins in my head the development in every direction, and, in as much as I know exactly what I want, the fundamental idea never deserts me,—it arises before me, grows,—I see and hear the picture in all its extent and dimensions stand before my mind like a cast, and there remains for me nothing but the labor of writing it down, which is quickly accomplished when I have the time.” 1822
​
Quotes about Music & Architecture
“Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“I see music as fluid architecture.” - Joni Mitchell
“If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.” - Quincy Jones