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Bertoia Sounds
- Clickable sound links on this page; these are rather bell-like sounds... clangy and mechanical, but they do have an interesting personality.
Bertoia Sound Sculptures
- An online catelog of sorts. Minimalist aesthetics.
Sonic Architecture
- Works from architects/designers Bill and Marv Buchen. Many are located around NYC.
Today we experimented with different strategies for sensing the motion of springs. The first was inspired by electric guitar pickups. I thought we might be able to create an electromagnetic pickup to sense the vibrations in the springs. We tried to create a simple electromagnet out of a nail and some transformer wire.... oh, yes... and a power drill.
We scrapped the pickup idea after measuring the resistance of the coil to be 0 Ohms. I was concerned it might short something out. Shlomit also thought we would have more creative possibilities if we used sensors rather than capturing the sound of the springs directly.
Returning to a previous sensing idea, we experimented with a flex sensors.
Flex sensors are not ideal for our application; they only sense motion in one direction and require a fair amount of deflection in order to produce a useful reading. (note for the future... measurement ranges would be useful for documentation purposes)
We also considered mounting the springs on top of a pair of joystick potentiometers to sense X-Y movement. The miniature potentiometer we tried to use for our prototype was too stiff to yield useful results. We wrapped a copper wire around the dial of the potentiometer, hoping that motion of the springs on our installation mockup would move the potetiometer and generate a varying resistance. No luck.
Another version of the musical speech patch. I spoke with Peter last week about fffb~ and made it work -- to some degree.
I ran into trouble finding the frequency bin with the maximum energy. Jonathan Marcus helped me with a solution to that problem using the zl object.
The patch makes some sounds now, but still not what I hoped for. I wanted a patch that would highlight the musicality of recorded speech. I expect it would work better on some voices than others, but so far it just sounds "random."
Using the patch
- Enable the DAC
- Click the "open" message to load a file into the sfplay~ object
- Click the "1" attached the sfplay~ object to start playback
- The following controls modify the output: transform strength, wave volume, and transform volume
- "Transform Strength" controls the scaling of the values coming out of the fffb~. Increasing the transform strength with cause larger numbers to be packed into the frequency bin energy list. This primarily affects the height of the peaks on the multislider display.
- "Wave Volume" and "Transform Volume" adjust the relative sound levels of the original .wav file and the transformed signal. Set transform volume higher than wave volume to emphasize the transformed sound.
To try out this patch, simply copy the following lines and paste them into MAX/MSP
#P window setfont "Sans Serif" 9.;
#P window linecount 9;
#P comment 399 18 143 9109513 fffb~ is used here to break the audio from the .wav file into separate frequency bands. The band with the most energy will choose the frequency to be played. In this way \, I hope to create a system which highlights the melodic aspects of human speech.;
#P window linecount 1;
#P newex 70 478 33 9109513 *~ 0.5;
#P flonum 110 430 35 9 0 0 0 139 0 0 0 221 221 221 222 222 222 0 0 0;
#P flonum 234 551 35 9 0 0 0 139 0 0 0 221 221 221 222 222 222 0 0 0;
#P flonum 246 105 35 9 0 0 0 139 0 0 0 221 221 221 222 222 222 0 0 0;
#P flonum 459 301 35 9 0 0 0 139 0 0 0 221 221 221 222 222 222 0 0 0;
#P flonum 529 300 35 9 0 0 0 139 0 0 0 221 221 221 222 222 222 0 0 0;
#P flonum 580 301 35 9 0 0 0 139 0 0 0 221 221 221 222 222 222 0 0 0;
#P message 248 370 395 9109513 60. 120. 180. 240. 440. 510 530 600 660 700 725 800 880 900 910 940 1000 1060 1120 1180;
#P newex 185 489 35 9109513 zl reg;
#P newex 185 456 72 9109513 t b i;
#P newex 184 520 35 9109513 zl nth;
#P newex 185 428 36 9109513 zl sub;
#P newex 211 403 65 9109513 maximum 0.;
#P newex 185 379 36 9109513 t l l;
#P newex 185 613 33 9109513 *~ 0.8;
#P newex 184 579 36 9109513 cycle~;
#P flonum 184 555 35 9 0 0 0 139 0 0 0 221 221 221 222 222 222 0 0 0;
#P message 106 77 14 9109513 0;
#P message 87 77 14 9109513 1;
#P message 47 77 28 9109513 open;
#P newex 524 257 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 524 230 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 484 257 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 484 230 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 441 257 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 444 230 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 404 257 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 404 230 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 364 257 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 364 230 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 324 257 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 324 230 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 284 257 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 284 230 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 244 257 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 244 230 29 9109513 avg~;
#P toggle 176 77 15 0;
#P newex 176 105 50 9109513 metro 100;
#P toggle 13 77 15 0;
#P newex 201 258 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 201 231 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 161 258 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 161 231 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 121 258 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 121 231 29 9109513 avg~;
#P newex 185 326 160 9109513 pack 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.;
#P newex 81 258 33 9109513 * 128.;
#P newex 81 231 29 9109513 avg~;
#P user multiSlider 300 440 200 96 0. 75. 12 2937 15 0 0 2 0 0 0;
#M frgb 249 203 82;
#M brgb 255 255 255;
#M rgb2 127 127 127;
#M rgb3 0 0 0;
#M rgb4 37 52 91;
#M rgb5 74 105 182;
#M rgb6 112 158 18;
#M rgb7 149 211 110;
#M rgb8 187 9 201;
#M rgb9 224 62 37;
#M rgb10 7 114 128;
#P newex 145 667 28 9109513 dac~;
#N sfplay~ 2 120960 0 ;
#P newobj 62 105 48 9109513 sfplay~ 2;
#P newex 114 159 157 9109513 fffb~ 12 60 0.5 0.1;
#P window linecount 2;
#P comment 233 522 49 9109513 Transform Volume;
#P window linecount 1;
#P comment 284 101 100 9109513 transform strength;
#P window linecount 2;
#P comment 106 400 67 9109513 Wave Volume;
#P window linecount 0;
#P comment 1011 12 100 9109513;
#P window linecount 1;
#P comment 12 53 29 9109513 DAC;
#P comment 45 52 100 9109513 WAV File Control;
#P comment 299 414 100 9109513 Frequency Response;
#P comment 248 352 141 9109513 List of frequencies to play;
#P window linecount 5;
#P comment 220 18 170 9109513 Michael Chladil 3/29/2007 MAX/MSP programming help from Jeremy Rozenstein Jonathan Lee Marcus;
#P connect 43 0 10 0;
#P connect 42 0 10 0;
#P connect 41 0 10 0;
#P connect 10 1 60 0;
#P connect 10 0 60 0;
#P connect 23 0 13 0;
#P connect 9 0 13 0;
#P connect 13 0 14 0;
#P connect 59 0 60 1;
#P connect 57 0 14 1;
#P connect 10 1 9 0;
#P connect 10 0 9 0;
#P connect 23 0 16 0;
#P connect 9 1 16 0;
#P connect 16 0 17 0;
#P connect 57 0 17 1;
#P connect 46 0 11 0;
#P connect 22 0 11 0;
#P connect 60 0 11 0;
#P connect 23 0 18 0;
#P connect 9 2 18 0;
#P connect 18 0 19 0;
#P connect 46 0 11 1;
#P connect 24 0 23 0;
#P connect 57 0 19 1;
#P connect 52 0 50 0;
#P connect 50 0 44 0;
#P connect 44 0 45 0;
#P connect 14 0 15 0;
#P connect 15 0 47 0;
#P connect 47 0 49 0;
#P connect 49 0 51 0;
#P connect 51 0 52 0;
#P connect 45 0 46 0;
#P connect 17 0 15 1;
#P connect 23 0 20 0;
#P connect 9 3 20 0;
#P connect 20 0 21 0;
#P connect 58 0 46 1;
#P connect 51 1 50 1;
#P connect 53 0 52 1;
#P connect 19 0 15 2;
#P connect 47 1 48 0;
#P connect 48 0 49 1;
#P connect 57 0 21 1;
#P connect 21 0 15 3;
#P connect 26 0 15 4;
#P connect 23 0 25 0;
#P connect 9 4 25 0;
#P connect 25 0 26 0;
#P connect 28 0 15 5;
#P connect 30 0 15 6;
#P connect 57 0 26 1;
#P connect 32 0 15 7;
#P connect 23 0 27 0;
#P connect 9 5 27 0;
#P connect 27 0 28 0;
#P connect 34 0 15 8;
#P connect 15 0 12 0;
#P connect 36 0 15 9;
#P connect 57 0 28 1;
#P connect 38 0 15 10;
#P connect 23 0 29 0;
#P connect 9 6 29 0;
#P connect 29 0 30 0;
#P connect 40 0 15 11;
#P connect 57 0 30 1;
#P connect 23 0 31 0;
#P connect 9 7 31 0;
#P connect 31 0 32 0;
#P connect 57 0 32 1;
#P connect 23 0 33 0;
#P connect 9 8 33 0;
#P connect 33 0 34 0;
#P connect 57 0 34 1;
#P connect 35 0 36 0;
#P connect 23 0 35 0;
#P connect 9 9 35 0;
#P connect 36 0 56 0;
#P connect 57 0 36 1;
#P connect 23 0 37 0;
#P connect 9 10 37 0;
#P connect 37 0 38 0;
#P connect 57 0 38 1;
#P connect 23 0 39 0;
#P connect 9 11 39 0;
#P connect 39 0 40 0;
#P connect 38 0 55 0;
#P connect 57 0 40 1;
#P connect 40 0 54 0;
#P window clipboard copycount 62;
The Final project for Living Art will adhere to the following process:
Concept Development
Prototype
Build
Refine
Present
Earlier this week, Ji-Sun Lee and Youjeong Paik approached me about collaborating on the final project. I was still on the fence about whether to try combining my Audio Art final with this final.
Ji-Sun, Youjeong, and I brainstormed plant-like ideas yesterday. Today, So-Young joined us for a bit. We played around with a number of ideas.
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At the end of our session today, we ended up gazing at the stars.
What: Make a Wish
"Make a Wish" is an immersive environment that offers the participant an opportunity to gaze into the night sky and make a wish on a falling star.
Why
How
Challenges
Shlomit and I made some progress on our audio art final. We decided to build a sonic field of springs.
Strategies for sensing movement:
After brainstorming more about producing sound and sensing movement, we built a tiny prototype, using the technique I discovered while building a prototype for Designing for Constraints.
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Summary:
The Secret Tree listens, interprets and stores people's secrets in its leaves or fruits with a unique format.
Idea:
Interactive sound installation which invites participants to confess their secrets. As people speak their secrets into a large knothole in the center of the to the tree it "grows" with blooming flowers and whispering fruits.
Materials:
6' tall cardboard tree with LED lighting and miniature speakers
Inspiration:
The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein
In the Mood for Love - Wong Kar Wai
Team:
Michael Chladil
Jee-Sun Lee
Ai-Chen Lin
My Role:
- Arduino microcontroller code
- MAX/MSP Programming
- Prototype circuit design and fabrication
- Basic woodworking
See the process.
I'm working on a personal art project for my final in Designing for Constraints. The following is my first prototype. I feel pulled in many directions simultaneously -- with ITP pulling the hardest. The inner sphere represents me. The springs tug at me in all directions.
I developed this prototype from a simple sketch:
I built the prototype out of materials I already had in my studio:
 CD jewel case covers |  Old guitar strings and 24 gauge wire spun into springs |
 |  26 gauge wire wrapped around a still central armature |
Class feedback:
- Walls of the piece could deform under pressure.
- Piece seems performative -- it may require my performance of the object to get its point across. A video might help with this.
- Stretch the box to its limits and videotape it as it breaks
Special thanks to Caleb Clark, Anh Nyugen, and Rucyl Mills for their awesome work in filming the Secret Tree.
March 24th, 2007. New York City.
Episode 4: 4 minutes
Wherein we take at Michael, Aichen and Sun's Physical Computing project "Secret Tree.
They have more episodes at http://techtrek.tv
Aaron Siegel and Chris Peck and were guest lecturers in Audio Art this afternoon. Both compose works for untrained performers. This is one of the reasons I came to study at ITP. I want to design systems to enable untrained performers to collaborate musically.
Aaron's piece "Work in Manufacturing" was a percussive piece with fixed rules, but varying outcomes regulated by each performer's breathing. The rules of the piece made me feel disoriented at times because I had to keep a number of things in mind: how times I had inhaled or exhaled since beginning my current "station," how many "stations" I had completed, and the number I had chosen as my "jump" number for selecting subsequent stations.
The overall sound of the piece was intriguing, but I prefer tonal music.
Chris' piece "Worried Long" was a "choral" piece. I found it easier to appreciate the quality of the sound in this piece because it was richer and sustained. It sounded majestic as we sang it. I was very surprised at how harmonic it sounded -- even though none of us knew the intervals we were supposed to sing. Further, only about half the class was musically trained. I don't know how many of us could say that we know how to sing, but I really enjoyed the sound we created and would definitely consider it music. The dynamics were incredible and it was invigorating to belt out the slowed down lyrics with the rest of the class as we reached the climax of the piece.
I've been thinking about the discussion Amit and I had about believability. Both of the pieces seemed to have that quality. I knew nothing of the two composers beyond their remarks prior to performing the pieces, but it seemed that each piece matched the personality of its composer. Additionally, it was believable that we were creating the music together. Neither piece asked us to make an "impossible" committments in performing them. Collectively, we had all of the skills necessary to render the works. There was no need to think about which performers would be capable of properly interpreting their parts.
I'm working with Shinyoung on a project called "Dust" for Wearables.
"Dust" is a discrete, wearable character who offers spoken affirmation and support in response to "deflated" gestures.
Initially we tried sensing a sigh in order to trigger Dust's affirmations. We planned to mount a stretch sensor inside a waist-belt and sense the expansion and contraction of the wearer's diaphragm. Preliminary experiments with the stretch sensor did not yield favorable results. The stretch sensor seems to be optimized for applications involving greater ranges of motion.
We decided to try a different approach. It may be possible to use pleated material with conductive thread or fabric between the pleats to sense the sigh. In the pictures below, I am pleating a section of fabric to create a prototype of the gesture sensing mechanism.
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Shlomit and I are proposing a final project around visualizing the propagation of sound and exploring the physicality of sound.
One of our ideas is an installation which captures the evolution of sound in a space. Colored lights suspended from the ceiling of the space react to sounds created in the space. We draw our inspiration from the ephemeral quality of warm breath in cold winter air. As you exhale, a gentle fog issues from your lips into the surrounding air.
Other ideas surrounding this first proposal are issues of memory and the incarnational power of words. The words we speak and the words we hear are not mere acoustical vibrations. They carry meaning. What if we could see these vibrations as they occured? What if we could see lingering traces of these vibrations?
Our second idea is an installation where the viewer walks through a field of flexible reeds. As the reeds are pushed aside, pleasant sounds are created in the space.
I spoke with Peter today about the difficulty I was having with the with fftin~ and fftout~ objects in MAX. He suggested I try the fffb~ object instead, which he used in the past to create a real-time frequency analyzer. I'll give it a try this weekend.
I'm not sure how to react to this reading. I don't think I've listened to minimal music, yet. Perhaps I should try to find some. Composers mentioned in the reading were La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Perhaps the Avery Fischer Media Collection at Bobst has recordings. It would be even more ideal if there was a place online to listen -- and in fact there is. We have access to The Anthology of Recorded Music
I'll have more to say after I hear some.
I'm working to figure out how to analyze the dominant frequency of an audio signal. This takes me into the world of fft~. In an effort to avoid further reading, I search the MAX/MSP forums for audio to midi conversion.
This yields a patch called fiddle~ which is supposed to follow pitch. The fiddle patch appears to only run on Macintosh... it requires externals.
I return to the MAX/MSP documentation and try to puzzle over fft~. I read the tutorials in chapters 25 and 26. The documentation seems to present a progression. The fft~ object performs basic Fast Fourier Transforms, but doesn't take into account the overlap (?) of sample bins. I was skimming, so this is all a little unclear. All I'm looking to do is take frequency readings every "n" seconds in order to construct a "melody" out of some recorded speech. The tutorials seem to indicate I'll need to "window" my samples and that the pfft~ object takes this problem into account. There's even a diagram of a patch that shows how to read off the current frequency. The problem is, I don't know how to create an embedded subpatch for pfft~ to use. I try, instead, to create a named subpatch.
This works, but I found that the output I was sending out of the subpatch I create didn't change at all. Reading the tutorial more closely:
Note that in the above example the number~ object is used for the purposes of demonstration only in this tutorial. When DSP is turned on, the number displayed in the signal number box will not appear to change because the signal number box by default displays the first sample in the signal vector, which in this case will always be 0. To see the center frequency values, you will need to use the capture~ object or record this signal into a buffer~.
I added a capture~ object to the output of my test program, but this didn't work.
Quotes:
"Neuhaus aims for a tuning of sound and place as an expanded instrument"
- One of my interests is in the design of musical instruments that are readily playable in improvizational settings with very low barriers to participation.
"... making the experimental strand of musical practice susceptible to a different set of conditions and questions"
"Neuhaus invited an audience or listener to claim the work for him or herself."
"At that moment [Public Supply I] became a group activity -- a process of people making sound together, listening to it, and adjusting what they did according to what was going on. I think this is the heart of the musical process -- this dialogue"
- Yes. I tried an improvizational music-making experiment on Tuesday night in my Designing for Constraints class which explored a bit of this idea.
"Concentrating on this field of sound creates a heightened involvement with a given environment, as a means of cartographically locating sounds, their possible sources, and their meanings, not entirely as communicable message, but as an environmental condition"
- Seems to echo Pauline Oliveros' essay on deep listening. Listening becomes more than just concentrating deeply when experiencing music or sonic art. Perhaps I can make the comparison to an idea regarding drawing I read which related to the creative practices of Leonardo Da Vinci. I have experienced in drawing an understanding of the mechanics of that which I draw. Beyond the artistic composition of a drawing there lies a body of knowledge of the object of the drawing -- the way in which that object behaves: response to light, intersections of its components, the dynamics of its motion. The rendering of an object's image on paper draws upon this understanding. I wonder if the same is not true of sound: something of the structure and mechanics of an object are illuminated through careful listening.
"temporalizing space"
For further research:
Minimalism
Last night, in preparation for building a perf board, I drew a first draft of the schematic for the Secret Tree.
There are several things to do yet to properly document the project's electronics:
Anyone have suggestions on how to simplify this schematic?
This afternoon I attempted to connect the Secret Tree circuit board to the LEDs on the tree. Since my test program (adapted from an Arduino tutorial) appeared to be working well I was ready. The first six LED clusters I connected to the terminal blocks worked fine, but the seventh and eighth clusters didn't operate properly. I tried resetting the Arduino board as well as the MAX patch, but things wouldn't work consistently. I even saw that a single LED connected to the seventh output didn't light up consistently. Once I disconnected all of the clusters and returned to single LEDs, the system seemed to function properly. Maybe the LED clusters are drawing too much current and are causing the digital potentiometers to behave erratically.
Back at home, I found a small breadboard wiring problem: I didn't have a proper connection to ground for the pins 15, 18, 19, and 22 on the second AD5206. Even so, the LEDs connected to the potentiometer outputs related to those pins still lit up. My correction only served to properly extinguish the LEDs when I set the potentiometers on that side of the chip to the maximum 10K resistance.
The light blue wire connected to ground above the AD5206 is the recent addition.
So far, I have tried the following in order to get the software/hardware system working:
Tomorrow I will try using a power supply with more amperage to see if that improves things. Any other suggestions?
