Category Archives: Art

Art Music Voice of Sisyphus

Voice of Sisyphus at Nature Morte Gallery, Berlin

Art Drip Music

Drip at Soundwalk, Long Beach

Last Saturday we showed Drip at the 2012 Soundwalk outdoor music festval in Long Beach, CA. The audience seemed to really engage with it and we heard lots of great feedback. In the past we’ve only installed it outside, so this was a pretty strange experience. A puddle quickly gathered on the floor and looked quite dangerous with all the power cables running everywhere, so a few people were too scared to go near it! Most just came right up and started playing though. This is one of the videos that was taken- unfortunately whoever shot it didn’t realize that the piece is a collaboration with Muhammad Hafiz so his name wasn’t included in the credits.

Here are a couple photos from the show:

Art Code Drip Music

Drip: a Water Powered Sound Installation

I created this piece in collaboration with the new media artist Muhammad Hafiz Wan Rosli this spring. It was featured in the UCSB Media Art and Technology Program’s “Bits and Pieces” Exhibition back in May and we’ll also be showing it on September 1st at the Soundwalk Festival in Longbeach.

This is a technical description from the Soundwalk proposal:

“Drip is an interactive sound sculpture consisting of 16 tuned metal bars hung from a 3” by 3” by 5” high (freestanding) iron frame. Attached to the frame above each bar are solenoid water valves that can be triggered by an Arduino microcontroller. As the valves are opened and closed, drops of water pass through them falling onto each of the sixteen bars. The resulting sound is acoustically amplified through attached piezoelectric microphones. This action of falling water produces rhythms and melodies which are sequenced in real time and which can be altered by the audience’s interaction via light sensors embedded in the piece. Since all sound is generated acoustically, viewers can also interact with the piece by directly tapping the bars or plucking the nylon wire that suspends them in the air. The resulting soundscape is something like a surrealist version of rain falling on a tin roof or a collection of gongs being struck in chaotic mathematical patterns.”

Art Code Music

Standing Waves

“Standing Waves” is an interactive multimedia installation based off of a 3D implementation of the universal wave equation. Motion-tracking controllers allow the audience to physically “drag” waves through the virtual pool. A system of oscillators hidden beneath these waves is used to sonify the amount of energy at each region of the system. Because each oscillator is tuned to a different frequency, participants can hear energy propagate throughout the system as they interact with it.

The piece was created with Processing using the glGraphics, PeasyCam, and minim libraries.

Art Code Music Voice of Sisyphus

Voice of Sisyphus Presented at ICAD

On June 19th I gave a talk with my colleague Ryan McGee at the 2012 International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD), hosted by Georgia Tech. Our presentation was about image sonification (turning pixels into sound) and a piece we created using this technique called “Voice of Sisyphus.”  Here’s a link to the white paper: Voice of Sisyphus: an Image Sonifcation Multimedia Installation

Voice of Sisyphus is a multimedia installation created in conjunction with Ryan McGee under the artistic direction of George Legrady. It opens at Nature Morte Gallery, Berlin on September 7th, 2012 and was displayed at the Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles November 2011 – February 2012.

Art Music

Oscilloscope Interface Studies

Over the past year I’ve been experimenting every so often with an audio-visual performance interface based off of Lissajous Displays and the 3D Oscilloscope series by Dan Iglesia. My version uses a glove-based motion capture interface that we have here at UCSB in the Allosphere, our 3-story mutlimedia environment. Here’s what they look like:

And here are are a few screenshots of the performances. Basically the performer puts on these gloves, which control the frequencies of multiple oscillators. These are then visualized as an oscilloscope display and the resulting pixels are translated into sound. A skilled performer can access many interesting shapes like the ones below tuning the oscillators in harmonic ratios.

Art

Nebulous

This is a an animation of wave propagation mixed with reaction diffusion that I programmed in C++. I start by triggering a single red wave in the center, which sets the complex system in motion.

It works well as a metaphor for the creation of the universe because slight irregularities in the starting conditions allow unstable patterns to emerge (in this case, the trigger wave was ever so slightly off-center). By measuring the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), physicists have discovered that the early universe was slightly irregular. This irregularity is what allows galaxies, stars, and planets to form. If instead it were completely uniform, it would have remained in a stable state and nothing would have emerged. Similarly, this animation starts out with very symmetrical, slow-moving patterns but as time goes on these become more chaotic and complex.

Drawing inspiration from animators such as Oskar Fischinger, I set this to a classical score that I think fits quite nicely. The piece is movement 15 of “Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus” (Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus) by Olivier Messiaen.