Designing and fabricating materials from fire using sonification and deep learning

Abstract

Fire has fascinated humankind since the prehistoric era. Rooted in the interactions between sound and flames, here we report a method to use fire for a variety of purposes, including sonification, art, and the design and manufacturing nature-inspired materials. We present a method to sonify fire, thereby offering a translation from the silent nature of flames, to represent audible information and to generate de novo flame images. To realize material specimen derived from fire, we use the autoencoder to generate image stacks to yield continuous 3D geometries that are manufactured using 3D printing. This represents the first generation of nature-inspired materials from fire and can be a platform to be used for other natural phenomena in the quest for de novo architectures, geometries, and design ideas, thus creating additional directions in artistic and scientific research through the creative manipulation of data with structural similarities across fields.