Dom Berrini may be the closest thing snowboarding has to a mad scientist. Hearing what went into developing the graphics for the Family Tree and Mystery Process boards truly left me rapt. Dom has anthropomorphized these boards, not only finding their personalities, but personifying them through sound waves. He has made it so you can see how these boards react to the snow gliding below them. How? Well, that's arguably a more interesting story.
"Cymatics, as I understand it, are a visualization of sound. The easiest way to think of it is like, you drop the pebble in the water and it disturbs it, and you can see that. In this way, we're taking sound, and we're creating something that we can see with it."
Norm: Can you start by doing a quick introduction: Your name, what you do, what type of art you can create and then what your connection is to Burton.
Dom: My name is Dominic Berrini, and as an artist I cycle through quite a few different things. I have a couple standards though. I'm always doing some stained glass, and I'm always doing a little bit of sewing and some costume work, and I always have a little bit of electronics or music stuff going on, and I cycle right through. Whatever's hot, whatever season it is, I go for it. We're in costume season now, so I'm building a stilt costume for Art Hop next week so we can go parade in the streets. Apart from that, I just kind of follow the course and sometimes do science-type things like we did with this graphic here. And for Burton—I was an employee for 10 years, most recently the rapid prototype technician on the research and development team.
Before we dive into specifics, I was wondering if you could kind of give a layman's overview of what cymatics are?
I'm no expert, I'm no scientist, but I know enough to get involved and play with it. Cymatics, as I understand it, are a visualization of sound. The easiest way to think of it is like, you drop the pebble in the water and it disturbs it, and you can see that. In this way, we're taking sound, and we're creating something that we can see with it. It represents the sound in a way.
In our email correspondence before this, you briefly touched on the birth of this project being that you were recording yourself snowboarding. Can you tell us about that?
I've got these little pickups that I put on stuff. They're called Piezo pickups. They're these little discs, and you just stick them on something, and all of a sudden, if you run it into an amplifier, it becomes electric. You can make an electric drum out of your table just by sticking one of these pickups on it. So I put them on all kinds of stuff. And one day I was just thinking, "Man, what else could I put these on?" And I'm sitting there, and there's my board. I was like, "Geez, I could definitely get the sound of the snowboard, and who knows what it'll be like." But, so I took the pickups and just attached them onto the board, and then I started solving all the other little problems, like how am I going to record it? And then I made this little module. And so these pickups, they just stick to it. Usually, I just duct tape them in different places. But I made this module, which then runs into a cord that I send up my, uh, my snow pants leg, and then into my pocket where I have a digital recorder. So I would ride, and the entire time you're riding, the vibrations of the board are being transferred through these pickups into the digital recorder, and you get an audio recording of your board. But it's different from going out and filming, and getting some shots and sound on snow with a microphone. You don't get any wind here. You don't get any atmosphere. It's just pure vibrations from the board, and I think that's cool. So you can hear it crrrrr, as it's ripping through a turn. It's all gravelly, and then you take a little hop, and it goes absolutely silent until you hear the thud back down, and then it's ripping again.
And I was like, "Damn, I got this pure sound. What am I gonna do with this?" So I started putting it on my synthesizer and sample-izing it and making ambient textures. So that's all it started as.
Why was that something you were drawn to? Are you a musician?
Yeah, I play all kinds of instruments. I love playing music. I love writing music, and more than anything, I just like to play music to get a feeling. Like, after work and you're ready to just relax. You're not going to try to learn a song, you're just trying to get a groove out, and I like getting creative, so that was one way that I thought I could combine the two hobbies together.
You did the top sheets for the Family Tree and the Mystery Process, and they're both sound waves. Where did you get the sound waves from for both of those boards?
They came from Chladni plate experiments, just like you see on YouTube, the vibrating plates that you put sand on, and the plate vibrates and then it forms a pattern. It's dependent on a lot of different things. And as we were chatting at work about this, I was telling people about what I was working on. I was working on these different vibration projects. And we just got going, like, "Boy, it would be cool though if you could shake a snowboard and make one of those patterns on the snowboard." But that would be extremely difficult. You would need a serious kind of rig. It would be expensive and maybe not even work. But we figured we could scale it down, scale it down to one-tenth size. We figured we could make each board, cut it out in the machine shop. So it was brass. Brass just resonates well. And we painted one side black. And then you put it on a vibration generator. It's got a little, almost like a speaker down there with a rod attached to it. So any sound you put into it, it does its thing and vibrates. So we vibrate the boards, each and every one of them. And, you look for the frequencies. It doesn't just immediately make a shape. You have to find a very specific frequency to get it vibrating at, and it finds the natural resonances of the shape, and eventually you get these wild patterns.
You talked about analyzing the audio of a snowboard so you can find the board's personality, which as a snowboard nerd, is a concept I love. Were you trying to find, since these are two different boards, a specific vibe with the audio for each of them? Like, were they meant to be different vibration patterns?
Oh, yeah, they certainly are different. On the first prototype of the Mystery Process that I went out and rode and recorded, I'd come home and start processing it, checking it out, seeing how it sounds. And along with that, inside of my software I use, I have a little plugin, and it's got the full spectrum of frequencies that we could hear. So you could not only listen to your board, you could look at this graphic EQ of exactly what's getting excited. So there are certain spots where, boy, this thing would be peaking. This board is getting a little rowdy. And then there's other times when you can see it's perfectly smooth. It's just this beautiful line. So that's when I started thinking, "Man, everything I've checked so far has been totally different." The first time, I rode a Skeleton Key, and I put it on a fishtail, and then I was like, "Okay, these are way different. This is interesting." Not only does it sound different, I can see this thing. I was calling them signatures, like an audio signature of a board.
"They look like beautiful lines. You could sit there and just try to dream up a beautiful line, but I love that the only reason they exist is because of the ingredients that are in there, the shape, the makeup of the things, and tuning in these vibrations."
That's amazing. So, personality is just how the board handles?
Totally. You probably know what you like out of a board and certain characteristics that you tend to enjoy. This is just getting that.
Do you have a favorite little detail or piece of this board that you just find fascinating, on either the Family Tree or the Mystery Process?
I think it's just amazing. They look like beautiful lines. You could sit there and just try to dream up a beautiful line, but I love that the only reason they exist is because of the ingredients that are in there, the shape, the makeup of the things, and tuning in these vibrations. I think that's what I really enjoy about it.
Do you have any parting words?
Big thanks to the people that have contributed along the way. It was just a series of events. None of this was supposed to happen, but we never gave up on it. We just kept talking about it. Logan, my man in soft goods, he was the one who came up with one of the breakthroughs, the audio exciters. This is what we use to send vibrations into the boards so that we could read them. That was an amazing step. Casey Callahan and Dylan for getting down and dirty and really figuring out if we could do this and making it happen. And Jesse, always a great photographer. And so this was just a very memorable Burton moment for me.
