According to TED.com: “Designer Jared Ficklin creates wild visualizations that let us see music, using color and even fire (a first for the TED stage) to analyze how sound makes us feel. He takes a brief digression to analyze the sound of a skatepark — and how audio can clue us in to developing creativity.”

“In his day job, Jared Ficklin makes user interfaces at frog design. As a hobby, he explores what music looks like … in light, in shapes, in fire.”

“Jared Ficklin is a Senior Principal Design Technologist at frog, where he builds user experiences for clients, playing with interactions including touch and multi-touch, and applying physics to enhance the user experience. A passion for music and making things introduced him to the hobby of sound visualization, which has led him on occasion to play with fire. (As Flash on the Beach puts it, ‘Jared Ficklin’s sonic experiments stood out for their individuality, drama and casual disregard for health and safety.’) Every March in Austin, Texas, Ficklin organizes the frog party, a collective social experiment for a few thousand people attending SXSW Interactive. It’s a form of playful R&D for social technology. And he has spent 10 years helping fund, design and build quality free public skateparks for Austin as part of the Austin Public Skatepark Action Committee. “

New ways to see music (with color! and fire!) by Jared Ficklin

For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”

——————————————————————————————————–

I look forward to your thoughts and comments!