Mike D. @ ITP

I’ve been thinking more about how Sound/Space will be displayed and used, and while I think a lot of that may be dictated by the final form and its abillity to react to the audio cues of the surrounding area, it’s coming into its own a bit more at this point. I want it to exist in a space so that, when left alone, the form will react to what it hears and change shape, but when people want to interact with it, they can put on headphones and start pulling and pushing. The headphones can be the trigger themselves to shut the motors off (and make the levers push/pullable), and they will play the sound picked up by a mic above the form, run through Max, mutilated by the filters controlled by the form.

As a performance, it’ll be a bit simpler — the object will serve as a controller for a Max patch which features seven adjustable arguments (delay, res filter, overdrive, buffer, sample speed, bit rate, pitch), and pushing/pulling the points will move slide-pots, which will feed the values into the these parameters. What I’d like to do (as I see it now) is have the sound of a city space slowly fill in, and then start messing with that sound. I’ve been playing with that a bit, and it’s really amazing how melodic and rhythmic you can get it to sound.

The materials, thankfully, seem to have worked themselves out. I’ve covered this a bit before, but to recap: the main cage is steel (an electrician’s junction box), with steel supports around the top and sides. The mechanical guts are mainly just slide-pots (later, motorized sliders) with brass rods epoxyed on, attached to perfboards, held in place by bolts and armature wire. Power, ground and value wires run out from each, and are soldered to perfboards which run to an Arduino Mini. The Mini’s analog pins read the sliders’ values, and then send that to Max, where those values control the patch’s parameters.

What I’ve not worked out much is how I’ll keep that from getting boring — something like this can ride on novelty for the first minute or two (”ooh, he overran the buffer and now it’s going ‘WHAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEE’ in pitch!”), but I’d like this to actually be an enjoyable, musical performance, so I’m working on how to make that happen without having a backing band or something. I like Lesley’s idea of having singers back up the performance, but I’m not sure that fits for me. I’d considered having another person play acoustic guitar to it, and see if I could actually accompany the guitarist by playing the city — we’ll have to see how cheesy that ends up being. There’s a lot of experimentation still to do.

I’ve posted a lot about how the actual prototype looks, but not about how it’d fit into a space. So in its current size, as an installation, it’d probably look a bit like this:

Played, in real size, would be like this (except with a cover over the form):

(Thanks to Nick Hasty for being my model in this shot.)

As noted above, the question is what sound goes in and how it’ll be played, and I’m still a bit indecisive on that. So far I’ve been using drum samples (loops, kicks, snares) and it’s been really amazing to see how you can get play with them, but it wouldn’t be a whole performance. I’d started thinking about putting arpeggiating tones on top of the sound of the city, and I’d like to mess with that a bit, but I’m not sure it fits anymore. So better, I think, is the sound of city spaces piled on top of each other, wooshing in and out, with me messing with the sounds to create the piece. We’ll see.

By Wednesday I’ll have a score worked out, so that should illustrate what I’m hoping to do (as well as give me a chance to mess around a bit more with the sounds) — more to come on that.