John Kannenberg’s Reductive Waves is a meditation on the visualization of sound, via contrasting natural and human-crafted environments.

It features two main visual elements, the first of which is non-manipulated video footage of light moving across his living room wall, shot during a summer sunrise. The second is a series of digital images created via a reductive process in Photoshop, creating 150 abstract images which resemble soundwaves by using his photographs of resonant architectural spaces as source material.

These images were then animated and set to a soundtrack of manipulated field recordings of urban construction and waves on a lakefront along with synthesizer melodies and drones.
Reductive Waves premiered at Soundwalk 2008, East Village Arts District, Long Beach, California, 20 September 2008.