The Gaussophone

Jared D Friedman

A new musical instrument that plays along with you.

http://gemuse.org

Description

The Gaussophone is a new musical instrument played with the fingers of the left hand and a magnet held in the right (or, I suppose, vice-versa for left-handed players). At the same time, it is a computer-generated musical piece that allows the user to play along with it and solo over it, while selecting its next key changes based on what the user plays. At the moment, the computer's contribution begins randomly/probabilistically, and mostly supplies a backing track – the next step will be to have the program wholly base its music on what the user plays, beginning in silence and dynamically adapting to the tempo and pitch of the user's playing.

Other changes that will (definitely) occur before the Spring show are the prettying up of the instrument – replacing breadboard with perfboard, covering magnetic sensors with wood veneer, covering touch strip with thin rice paper.

Classes

Interactive Music

TIL.LY

Song Hia

TIL.LY is a microdiary webapp and a chatbot.

http://zeroco.github.io/tilly/

Description

The brain cheats when it comes to happiness. According to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, it focuses on two things about an event, the emotional peak and the end. He declares in his TED talk that “We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.” In the study A “Present” for the Future: The Unexpected Value of Rediscovery, Harvard Business School researchers discovered that the documentation of the everyday might seem trivial, but provides unexpected happiness because over time, we can come to see the ordinary past as extraordinary.

TIL (Today I Learned) is an experiment in encouraging daily presence, reflection, and documentation of the everyday.

Classes

Always On, Always Connected, Thesis

Voronoi Mirror

Ondina E Frate

Voronoi Mirror is an interactive sketch where users can see themselves in a distorted video capture that follows the Voronoi diagram.

http://ondinafrate.com/2016/04/19/noc-final-project/

Description

Voronoi Mirror uses the toxiclibs and mesh library in Processing. I first created lots of clusters, and then each node became a Voronoi point. Using video, the sketch captures the user's portrait in a distorted Voronoi mirror. The sketch moves and creates a new Voronoi diagram every time the user presses a button.

Classes

The Nature of Code

Piecing it Together Class Projects

Kendra C Leach

A space showcasing a spectrum of projects using various modes of fabrication, and that fulfill both artistic and utilitarian purposes.

http://www.piece-together.com/?page_id=189

Description

We intend to showcase a collections of items fabricated by NYU ITP students. These projects utilize historic mechanical equipment as design inspiration in order to create and enhance existing designs. The projects were created by using various digital modeling and fabrication techniques taught in the Piecing it Together class.

Classes

Piecing it Together

Sugar-Coated Extinction

Colby Blake

An actionable metaphor for the sixth extinction using taste and decision quotas.

https://colbyblake.com

Description

This is Part II of Sugar-Coated Extinction, a project that uses food to symbolize the scale and significance of living in a mass extinction event. Part II includes six novel flavor sugar cubes to represent different forms of life in Madagascar, an island that formed in relative isolation and free of human activity for millennia. The sugar cubes are illuminated from below to show the swirls of color in each block, a metaphor for the mystery that still shrouds our understanding of the natural world and the mystery that we are destroying when we fail to consider the artistic balance of biodiversity. Small hammers labelled with different mechanisms of extinction (labels not seen in video) are available for a viewer to chose how they wish to contribute to anthropogenic extinction. This project is about changing perceptions about the concept of extinction in the viewers mind. The hope is that the next time the viewer is confronted with dense extinction data or trivial rallies to save cute animals, they can understand such in the context of mass extinction by accessing their memory of taste, action and decision.

Classes

Temporary Expert: Design + Science in the Anthropocene

One Moment, One World

Phil Guo

Explore the universe composed of cheerful moments around you.

http://philguo.com/blog/2016/one-moment-one-world/

Description

Every moment today can be captured in 360, effortlessly. It then lives on in an universe of unexplored expanding moments, never to really be explored.

I found this notion a very interesting parallel, with an odd juxtaposition to the way we explore the universe. On the one hand we are building worlds, and on the other we are searching for new worlds.

One Moment, One World is a video installation which tries to find an intersect of these processes and represent them in an immersive and playful way.

Classes

The Nature of Code

Sound Emotion

Yue Hu

This project is used to visualize the emotion of the lively sound.

http://melodyhu.com/project/voice-visualization/

Description

Singing is a way to express feelings. We can tell the emotion’s change through the changing of tone or pitch. With this project, you could see the mood changes of the song through the lively visualization.

Classes

Interactive Music, The Nature of Code

Coral Reef

Marcela Nowak

Explore the Coral Reef

http://itp.marcelanowak.com/nature-of-code-final-proposal/

Description

Coral Reef is a 3D world created in Unity 3D. Beside static background, we can observe multiple school of fish swimming around the scene. The users become one of the fish, and can discover and explore the colorful coral reef by themselves while listening to peaceful soundtrack from 'Finding Nemo'. Ideally, I'd love to put this project to VR, if not, it could work well on a screen.

Classes

The Nature of Code

Telegraphone

Yuchi Ma

Telecommunication between telegraph key and smart phones.

http://yuchima.com/Telegraphone

Description

Telegraph communication has disappeared from telecommunication industry for so long that it only exist in spy movies. An “old” world-standard communication method had been gradually replaced by telephone, PC and mobile phones for so many years.

This project's idea is to make telegraphy live again as a communication tool, say hello to the modern cell phone through SMS, receive anybody's SMS and display morse code back to the user, give users access to experience this old telecommunication method.

Classes