Regarding the physical form: The inverted silver bowls used to deflect the audio content downward not only looked good but did an amazing job of blending in with the light fixtures. The hidden nature of the physical form added to the sounds illusiveness and complimented the sounds spatial quality quite well. The detail of capping the speaker from the bottom with a silver dome made of plastic kept the speaker hidden from plain sight.

Regarding audio content: After literally hundreds of tests with different samples and patches, the abstract sounds worked much better. At first I couldn't figure out why. My inclination was that recognizable sounds were going to work better because they were just that: recognizable. However, the abstract rhythms, sounds and tones used in the installation worked much better. I've come to believe that the abstract sounds worked better because visitors did not have preconceptions as to what the sounds were. Visitors listened and took in the sounds for what they were instead of attempting to transpose know sounds from someplace else.

Way to go! Hope everybody is having a great winter break. Talk to you soon.

The group had done a really nice set up in the Residents' lab.

We had 8 domes in total and used 4 power amps.

MAX/MSP patch by Leif,

Overall, great show, great collab. I hope to work with you all again very soon! :)

Current patch for MAX/MSP

PushPull

from RedBirds

I'm looking around for more of his stuff. I created a couple pieces in undergrad - using the Cappybara Kyma system, as well as in SoundHack, and Wishart's CDP software - SoundLoom - for spectral morphing. I'm not sure I still have anything, but i'll check tonight.

My spatial project was declined, so I'm glad to lend my knowledge of audio and MSP to your project. I worked with Mike today on strategies for powering the speakers. I feel that real power amps would be better than headphone amps. We hooked up two power amps from the ER and to four of the speaker and started panning sounds with a MSP patch. It sounded great! We may not be guaranteed these amps for the show however, but home stereo receivers will also work. Does anyone have a home stereo receiver to contribute during show? Otherwise we may be able to rip the stereo amplifier out of some cheap computer speaker, like the MoPod group did for their project. I also made a Max patch that smoothly pans a sound between eight speakers. Check it out.

Peace,
LK~

Quattro USB
Samson amplifier
1/4' stereo male - XLR male - XLR female - 2 1/8" mono male
2 1/4" mono - 1/4" mono

The sound is infintely better with the XLR connection- no more alligator clips.

We also went over some more content ideas. We like the idea of something that changes over time being projected through the space of the installation, or changes of sonic scenery. We're also still going to try splitting different tracks of the same recording. For tomorrow, we are going to use the following samples:

footsetps on glass
footsteps on gravel
bird sounds
radio traffic controller (this on esounds particularly good between two speakers- like a conversation

Sounds that move - We began to get at this a bit with the horse and carriage track we were listening to the other night. Other ideas include a motorcycle, race cars, or anything else with a prominent doppler effect.

Birds (or other nature sounds with emphasis of location and/or space) - Bird conversations evoke spatial idea. Using the sound domes, we would be emphasizing the spatial relationship of the bird to one another, making visitors of the installation more aware of the space they are in. Birds and nature in general is also contradictory to what people might be expecting to hear inside a building in Manhattan.

Laughter - Often when people hear laughing, they want to know what is going on, or what they are missing. Laughter, would make visitors look twice and examine the the space they are in more carefully. Additionally, laughter often makes people laugh and puts them in a good mood. Part of this should be fun, right?

Audio deconstruction - The idea would be to deconstruct an audio performance intended to be heard at one time. Each musician part of the performance would be played at the same time simultaneously, each out of a different speaker. Visitors would become more aware of the audio components and would need to move through the space in order to hear all each of them. A dialog and narrative is formed in the visitors mind as they move through space learning about the audio composition as they traverse the hallway. The irony is that they would never be able to hear all of the at once. Personally I like this idea, however it's probably the most difficult to pull off.

Xin, I know you had an in at a recording studio. Do yo know where we could get audio content that still recorded to the independent tracks, before its been mixed down? Is recording something way out of the achievable scope fro this project?

I hope this helps stimulate some thinking. I envision the audio program will most likely be a combination off all of the above. Thoughts? Ideas?

Other solutions involve multiple different speaker amps, mixers, building a better amp circuit (att: Min)...

MAX MSP people working hard.

Jacks for the stereo and mono. Mono plugs.

Joon Ho Phang is working on a similar project for his Pcomp instrument and was able to give us some help when we tested out Christin's recordings. Initially, it sounded quite bad. A 1uF cap that goes in between pins 2 and 3 made the sound less "scratchy" and "tin-y" This makes sense since these are the pins for the sound inputs from the computer.

high cello abridged

We also tried out some sound effects. Rain sounded pretty good, especially once the speaker was placed inside of the bowl. I'm going to keep running through different sounds and see what will work best. The goal right now is just to get something that will work with the four speaker panning we are trying to do for Friday's presentation. Also, it turns out that MAX supports wav files as well as AIFF.

rain splattering

They all worked!

Close up of the preamp circuit for Thomas D

We got a lot accomplished and have a solid plan of building our project box that would include all our 12 preamps and outs to the speakers.

Diagram of how this would work and the materials needed for tomorrow. Thank you Mike B!

Max MSP people working on how this will all work on the computer.

Hard at work

More to come tomorrow.