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Hook 1
Let’s travel back to the early 1800s where a man by the name of Joseph Fourier, facing a
seemingly impossible problem in physics, comes up with such an ingenious solution
that it immortalises his name amongst the greatest mathematicians of all time. What he
discovered is now called the fourier series in his honor and the beauty it shows in the
form of art is amazing.
2
So what was this amazing discovery? He found this simple idea that any function can be
represented as the sum of many simple functions. These simple functions were the sine
and cosine waves of any magnitude as shown in the graph. On the right you can also see
the legendary man fourier himself being shown using his own series. A hint to what is to
come.
5
Now to make things simpler, think of the fourier series as this process of assembling
legos. You start with simple lego bricks of different sizes which you join together to
make anything you can imagine. Similarly, in fourier series, the different sine and cosine
waves are the lego bricks which can be added together to create any function that you
want, given that you have enough of these waves. This elegant idea reveals its beauty in
many areas of art.
Before we proceed, I would like to bring your attention to another, arguably more
important, side of the fourier series called fourier analysis. Referring back to our lego
analogy, fourier analysis is, simply put, the reverse of the fourier series, it is the process
of breaking down a function into its simple component parts just like how you can break
down a lego build into the original lego bricks that made it, we call it delegofication, an
activity my sister really enjoyed doing after I had spent hours building that lego firetruck
*annoyed*. Nevermind, the main idea here is that you can use these disassembled parts,
these lego bricks, the sine and the cosine waves, and adjust them to your liking. Then
add these components up using the fourier series to get a new function that is based on
your starting function.
11
Now we are going to show you people, artwork that was hand drawn by us. I coded up
two programs that could take in these artworks as inputs and display them as functions
of the fourier series. These are shown as the sum of rotating vectors which represent the
sine and cosine waves.
13
Finally, we have culminated all our efforts into this one final artwork, I hope you enjoy
and thank you for listening.
slide 3 (R)
Now, I’ll be deconstructing the mathematical formula of the fourier series. Firstly, the amplitudes
of the sine and cosine waves are shown by the coefficients, which are a₀, a₁, a₂, b₁ and b₂. This
means how large these sine or cosine waves are. Now, the frequency of the waves are
represented by the constant n, as we can see in the sine and cosine waves. This shows how
often the waves occur. These waves can be added as many times as you want.
slide 4 (R)
Now, let me give you an example. Suppose we want to create a square wave like the one
shown above. Initially, we have a normal periodic wave like the one shown on the left. Then we
have a wave with half the amplitude and with doubled frequency, and so on. By adding all these
periodic waves of different magnitudes, we can approximate the square wave. Therefore, by
adding these periodic waves infinitely, we can create a square wave like the one over here.
Slide 6 (S)
Now allow me to walk you through our gallery of various forms of art. Firstly we have abstract
art. These were created by generating specific asymmetrical functions.They were then
painstakingly manually coloured and toned to give the artworks a more humanistic and finished
look. The few pieces we have curated have been done so to demonstrate the extraordinarily
large range of functions that can be drawn with the use of these artworks.
Slide 7 (S)
The next section of our exhibit consists of repeating animations of geometrical figures. To create
these aesthetic animations a number of techniques have been used For example exhibit E and
H incorporate a technique where sections are assigned white +ve or black -ve values to create
striking images. While exhibit G and F make use of repeating patterns to overlay colours.
slide 9 (R)
So, we can apply the concept of fourier analysis in music. If you have a complex sound wave,
the fourier series can break it down into multiple smaller sound waves of different amplitudes.
So, let’s take an example. Suppose you record something you played on the trumpet, but you
miss some notes. The recorded sound wave can be deconstructed into a series of simple sound
waves. Then, we can change the amplitudes or frequency of that sound wave accordingly into
the correct note so we can auto tune it. Fourier series can not only be applied in visual arts, but
in music engineering as well.
Slide 10 (S)
As was explained on the last slide, we can break down a complicated sound wave into an
assortment of smaller ones with each one corresponding to a change in pitch and tone for a
certain instrument. If we assign each smaller wave to an object, the object can move and vibrate
along with the music. With this we can visualise how the music changes
Slide 12 (S)
Lastly, our group believes the most important thing about creating art is just having fun and
expressing yourselves, so we decided to include some of the pieces we drew and animated
using the fourier series.

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