Grains of Sound: Visual and Sonic Textures in Sand or Peter and the Wolf

There is a tendency in animation studies to discuss sound in the language of images, stressing sound’s alignment with visual cues (as in mickey mousing and leitmotifs). But sounds do not only mimic images: they add textures and emotions that change what we see. This article explores grain (texture) and timbre (tone color produced by specific instruments and techniques) as qualities shared by visual and sonic material. To do so, the author closely reads Sand or Peter and the Wolf (1969), where Caroline Leaf’s haptic sand animation is matched by Michael Riesman’s electroacoustic score. Leaf painstakingly molds animals by scraping away individual sand grains, and Riesman sculpts sonic textures with tiny adjustments to knobs and touch-sensitive pads on the Buchla modular synthesizer. Their collective improvisation with sands and sounds reveals new ways to think about artists’ material practices and the friction and interplay between images and sounds. They encourage spectators to perceive the animals as not merely plasmatic, or Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of contour-bending character animation. Instead, Leaf and Riesman deploy what the author calls ‘granular modulation’, expressing sand and animals with sensuous materiality. In Leaf’s and Riesman’s improvisations, grainy textures are the seeds of understanding how sound and vision become symbiotic – and encounter friction – in animation.

Diffraction Methods for Qualitative and Quantitative Texture Analysis of Ferroelectric Ceramics

Crystallographic textures are pervasive in ferroelectrics and underpin the functional properties of devices utilizing these materials because many macroscopic properties (e.g., piezoelectricity) require a non-random distribution of dipoles. Inducing a preferred grain texture has become a viable route to improve these functional properties. X-ray and neutron diffraction have become valuable tools to probe crystallographic textures. This paper presents an overview of qualitative and quantitative methods for assessing crystallographic textures in electroceramics (domain and grain textures) and discusses their strengths and weaknesses.

Effects of Impurity on Void Formation at Interface between Sn-3.0Ag-0.5Cu and Cu Electroplated Film

Void formation is a critical reliability concern for solder joints in electronic packaging. The control of microstructures and impurity quantities in Cu electroplated films significantly affects the void formation at the joint interface, but the studies for their comparison are seldom. In this study, three Cu films (termed as A, B, and C) are fabricated using an electroplating process. The Cu A film has a facted grain texture embedded with twins while Cu B and C have a similar columnar texture. After thermal aging at 200°C for 1000 h, the SAC 305 (Sn-3.0Ag-0.5Cu) solder joints with Cu A and B exhibit a robust interfacial structure without voids. However, microstructural collapse is observed in the solder joint of SAC 305/Cu C, where many crevives parallel to the interface are formed. Based on the microanalysis, the concentration of impurity is higher in the Cu C film than those in Cu A and B. Moreover, discrete voids rather than continuous crevices are presented in the SAC305/Cu C system when the impurity concentration in Cu C is reduced. The findings demonstrate that the impurity control in the Cu electroplated film is critical for the control of void/crevice formation in the electronic solder joints.