Neckties
"Ties are knots around your neck."
Stock images of neckties—symbols of corporate decorum and gendered convention—are converted into sound through sonification, a process that translates visual data into auditory form. The images are each scanned from left to right and top to bottom, with formal elements such as shape, placement, and color encoded into pitch, amplitude, and tempo. The tie’s surface—its smooth repetitions, its symmetry, its order—becomes audible, unsettling the familiarity of its design through a language of data and distortion. presents the translated material as a meditation on dress codes, identity, and the systems—visual, acoustic, cultural—that structure them.
Source material was drawn from Mitchells Men’s & Women’s Specialty Online Store. Backgrounds in the original images were removed in Adobe Photoshop and exported as PNG files. These were further processed using image-to-audio software, generating WAV files, while parallel experiments in sonification and sound visualization produced a supplementary archive of waveforms, spectrograms, and sonograms. The final piece, edited into a single-channel video loop using Final Cut Pro X.
Year: 2007
Medium: Single-channel video loop, color, sound
Resolution: 4K, 3840 x 2160 px
Duration: 00:03:00, 30 fps
Direction: Jason Mena
Sound: Jason Mena
Dimensions: Variable
Editions: 3 + A/P