Overview and self-reflection

I’ve dedicated the first week of thesis development to analyze my previous projects and envision where I would like to take them in the future, as well as what I would like to continue working on after the program in order to fully engage with brainstorming my thesis project. To start, I would like to write down a brief summary of my experience in the IMA Low Res program so far.

I really enjoyed the summer session, because I was able to further develop my sound production and add it a visual form, an audio-reactive experiment in Unity, where objects parameters were manipulated accordingly to the sounds volume. At the same time, at creative coding I was exploring, how does vision, influence art and got really interested in optical illusions while reading a book by Margaret Livingstone: The biology of seeing, and implemented some of the methods described into my projects.

Moving forward into the fall semester, I’ve been challenged conceptually in the Critical Experiences class and technically in Connections Lab. In my final project at CE, I was researching how does noise pollution affect social and environmental systems and came up with a online platform where users would be able to add sounds to the library so that they could be processed and with the help of machine learning categorized, to understand better the soundscapes surrounding us and eventually lower them or avoid them when they are dangerous and could have negative effects on health or the environment. Thanks to meeting with Gal Nissim, where she showed me a project made with open frameworks by Zach Lieberman, recording sound in space I started to question myself how could noise be visualized through Augmented Reality in real-time and how could sound be represented through different objects in space and would this AR visualization be helpful to track or understand noise pollution better?

At Connections Lab I’ve got a solid knowledge and understanding of web-based applications and some of the technologies available to create interactive experiences. For the mid-term project I’ve partnered up with Christina, and we developed some sort of an educational game where users are trying to map the pitch played in their speakers. The concept was based on two frequencies between 100-600Hz, which were panned to the left and the right speaker. When two frequencies are played and are less than 40Hz away from each other, this creates an auditory illusion called binaural beat. This project has reinforced my enthusiasm about illusions and it lead me to new discoveries of auditory illusions like McGurk effect, which indicates that visuals can change our perception of sound and therefore we can interpret it in a different way, or Shepard tone where an auditory illusion makes you think that sound is continually ascending or descending even though it is being looped. I started to wonder how could I implement some of these theories into my creative process and enrich my music production or if there is an auditory illusion which hasn’t been discovered yet? For the final project, Christina and I built a web-based communication app where text can be transformed into animal sound. Our motivation was to show how unique and interesting animal sounds are and is it possible to form a language to communicate with them? When we first tested the app, we got great feedback that this could be an “encrypted” or secret language shared between friends or community who would like to keep their conversations private or don’t find their native languages interesting anymore and would love to learn a new one. 

Project Designs

MiroBoard MindMap

Moving forward to February 2021, I am very much interested and enjoying crafting sounds and one of my  goals I would like to achieve is to start a music label and release musical journeys on a vinyl format. At first glance it might not look environmentally friendly as it is made out of PVC but I think that in the long term it is more sustainable than streaming music from online platforms, as more and more people use them and those data centers produce enormous amounts of CO2 emissions. I think there are also other cultural considerations to take into account when talking about streaming music platforms. The expectations of today’s society to access music are simply by clicking “play” and I think that on one hand streaming platforms enabled a lot of artists to publish their music but on the other hand music is losing transparency and all the tangible components and the users are missing out on knowing the background of the artist that produced their favorite song. Overall I think that music deserves a better format than being just binary data stored in a server and this brings me to a question: How to give a digital sound or a piece of music that lives in a server a tangible/physical form that is different from a play button?

Recently, I have encountered a video on the web, where a broken air conditioner is making a sound that is very similar to drums and the sequence is very organic. I started to search for similar videos and found a recording of a door closing and making a sound that could be easily recognized as a saxophone. These videos made me think about all the household appliances or architectural components that produce any kind of sound and I started to envision the city where sounds that everyday objects make would be replaced with a rhythmic sequence and could be manipulated by interactions in the environment. Giving architectural structures a new tone that would define them and evoke emotions within people interacting with those spaces.