This was our last project with Zoe and it lasted for two weeks instead of one. We were to make an audio instalation or performance and show case in the audio foundation.
At first it was just going to be me and one other guy, Sam, doing his instalation idea. His idea was to have a room, or corridorr that you would enter from one enterance and excit throuhg another and have lots of rope tied across the room. When someone entered the room they wold have to move the rope to get by it would make a sound.
We then had to others join the group as we thought it would be a lot of effort then went to the audio foundation to see where we could set it up. Unfortunately there wasn't really a good place to put his idea and it wasn't going to as epic if we had to scale it down so we started brainstorming other ideas.
The Audio Foundation itself is in the basement of the building so you have to go down a spriral staircase to get there. It had really bad acustics and gave everything an echo which we liked. When you first come into the Audio Foundation the stairs are right across from the door that have a metal rail. On the top floor there is a section of floor that is roped off by the rail that we thought might be cool to use.
THe end idea for that was to use peizos to pick up the vibrations on the rail and have a speaker either at the end of the stairs or at the top that played it back.
During this brainstroming I got to thinking on motion detecters. My very first idea was to use motin detectors change something about the audio we were makeing, e.g. if someone was at the top of the stairs the motion detector would pick them up and change the pitch of the audio playing.
Then I thought off making invisible instuments. You would move your hands like you were playing an instument, say a piano. When your fingers pushed the invisible button a motion detector would pick up the movement and play a note.
I think back to our original idea and thought of using a motion detector instead of ropes. This idea would also have to be a smaller production than that of his original idea becaue of limitations with the motion detector and cameras. This lent the idea to being more a performance than an instalation. I thought we could do a wordless converstaion. Neither of us know sign language so we would talk through gestures and body language that most everyone could understand. I know for myself I am not good with comucating things and am very shy so being able to comunicate without saying anything really is an interesting idea for me. I also thought we could link it back to Sam's idea about the subconcious making of sounds as we do things, such as having an innocent conversation.
It worked well as I did the patch and he made the sounds, and then the cord to plug my laptop into the PA system in the Audio Foundation.
For the patch I got the original motion detector from the internet. I then edited it so it worked on windows Max instead of the Max for Mac. In the original the screan was separated into fifteen different squares. I then divided those squares up as well. At frst I divided them up into fifteen more screens but we decide that was a little extenssive, and would involve getting 225 sounds. We also would have hade a problem with the sounds as they dont't really play well when you had a lot going at the same time, and you probable would hae noticed.
So we ended up with the original fifteen squares divided into quaters and each of thoe playing a different note.
I also had to edit the output of the screens as originaly they detected everything, even if you were sitting in front of it completely still it would still be picking up movement behind you. The output fromt the screen was a series of numbers, to make the motion detector less sensitive I recorded the output when it detected movement close up and made it so that it only worked when it detected that.
I then added in the sounds that my partner had made. And made each sound play through its own play button, which would also not have been possible with 225 sounds. Giving each its own sound button enabled all the sounds to play at once instead of one at a time.
I then put in the option to choose which webcam you wanted it to use for the motion detector and tidied it all up.
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