|
Presence Examples From the web site of The Discovery Channel Virtual Music Box Makes Sound Visual By Tracy Staedter, Discovery News May 5, 2005— A room-sized music box uses human-computer interface technology to create a virtual environment where visitors see sound. The award-winning art installation, Op_era: Sonic Dimension, which opened in late April at the Beall Center for Art and Technology in Irvine, Calif., is one way interactive artists are linking how a person uses a computer to the computer's output. "It's very different from sitting passively in a darkened room looking at screen, rapidly pushing buttons," said Simon Penny, professor of art and engineering at the University of California, Irvine. In this computer environment, visitors control their surroundings through sound and movement. The exhibit consists of a 10-foot-by-13-foot blackened room in which projectors cast the images of 300 white strings onto three black screens — one in the center of the room, flanked by two on either side. A microphone overhead picks up sound from every direction, while 80 motion sensors above the screens capture movement. Customized computer software collects the whispers, giggles and footfalls of the visitors as well as their activity and converts this into a visual response from the strings. The effect is like walking into a virtual music box, where individual strings vibrate according to their assigned visual and sound frequency, and each unique action or noise from visitors produces a corresponding vibration and sound — based on the Pythagorean music scale — from the strings. For example, if heels clicking on the floor create a natural A sound, the corresponding A strings will quiver and produce a sound that is both natural yet unfamiliar. "We wanted to produce an abstract sound," said artist Daniela Kutschat Hanns, who coordinates post-graduate studies at SENAC Communication and Art College in Sao Paulo, Brazil. "We didn't want to use something that people would recognize as an instrument." Thanks to the motion sensors, the computer-generated strings shimmy and emit tones if a person reaches out to strum them as well. And as their action disturbs the virtual air, it produces a rippled effect that causes neighboring strings to resonate. "People don't have a scientific approach," said Kutschat Hanns, "they have a touch approach." In this way, Kutschat Hanns and her partner on the project, Rejane Cantoni, an associate professor in technology and digital media at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo, explore how sound, an otherwise invisible phenomenon, occupies space. The installation will be open for virtual plucking until June 11.
An excerpt of a review in the OC (Orange County, California)
Weekly Basic Programming by CHRIS ZIEGLER [U]h, is that it? Well, yeah, admitted a Beall staffer. The OP_ERA installations back in Brazil are the firecrackers, colliding pixeled waves of sound into more and more sophisticated hybrid forms—circle to square to dodecahedron—and finally to what the artists call the “fourth dimension,” where the user fully enters the system as a particle, an apparently immersive experience that launches OP_ERA into an orgasm of spirals and lines. That climaxes as a visual and sonic feedback loop with the user at the core, and that particular incarnation of OP_ERA is not the one at Beall. Instead, since this is the first time the exhibit has traveled, Kutschat and Cantoni kept it simple—for logistic reasons?
|