Eva Chen
Let the magic happen.
Description
This is a magic AR crystal ball that tells you your fortune of today.
Classes
Electronic Rituals, Oracles and Fortune-Telling, Magic Windows
AR Crystal Ball
Join
Max Horwich
A voice-controlled web VR experience invites you to sing along with the robotic choir
https://wp.nyu.edu/maxhorwich/2018/04/30/join/
Description
Join is an interactive musical experience for web VR. A choir of synthesized voices sings from all sides in algorithmically-generated four-part harmony, while the user changes the environment by raising their own voice in harmony.
Inspired by the Sacred Harp singing tradition, the music is generated in real time, based on Markov chains derived from the original Sacred Harp songbook. Each of the four vocal melodies are played from the four corners of the virtual space toward the center, where the listener experiences the harmony in head-tracking 3D audio. A microphone input allows the listener to change the VR landscape with sound, transporting them as they join in song.
While the choir is currently programmed to sing only in solfege (as all songs in the Sacred Harp tradition are usually sung for the first verse), I am in the process of teaching the choir to improvise lyrics as well as melodies. Using text also drawn from the Sacred Harp songbook, I am training a similar set of probability algorithms on words as notes. From there, I will use a sawtooth oscillator playing the MIDI Markov chain as the carrier, and a synthesized voice reading the text as the modulator, combining them into one signal to create a quadrophonic vocoder that synthesizes hymns in real time.
For this show, I present to show Join in a custom VR headset — a long, quilted veil affixed to a Google Cardboard. Rather than strapping across the user’s face, this headset will be draped over the head and hang down, completely obscuring their face and much of their body. After experiencing the virtual environment, participants are invited to decorate inscribe the exterior of the headset with patches, fabric pens, or in any other way they see fit — leaving their own mark on a piece that hopefully left some mark on them.
Classes
Algorithmic Composition, Electronic Rituals, Oracles and Fortune-Telling, Expressive Interfaces: Introduction to Fashion Technology, Interactive Music, Open Source Cinema
SOMATAROT
Erin Cooney, Kimberly Lin
Inside the SOMATAROT experience, you process your reading through the embodied oracle dance guided by mysterious holographic sibyls.
http://alpha.editor.p5js.org/full/rky9RTwTM
Description
Bring your worries &/or curiosities to the SOMATAROT experience. The holographic readers will guide you through the embodied oracle dance. We enter into randomness’ mysterious guidance that has been called upon throughout time and cultures. “Soma” comes from the idea of Somatic therapy where our experiences, emotions and trauma are not only stored in our mind but throughout our body. Dance originated from ritual of movements used to metabolize energy within an individual and the collective. We interpreted the essence of each card and choreographed a movement phrase to express it. The user follows the card’s movement as the audio description of the card is played, providing the querent with a multi-sensory, embodied experience.
Classes
Electronic Rituals, Oracles and Fortune-Telling
The Soul Reader
Dan Oved
The soul reader uses the focus of a viewer's gaze to generate imagery that's a reflection of their subconscious.
http://www.danioved.com/blog/posts/electronic-rituals/the-soul-reader/
Description
This is a screen based experience which uses the focus of a viewer's gaze to continuously generate imagery. It shows the viewer different colors, text, shapes, and scenes, and uses recent advances in machine learning to determine which of these elements the viewer's gaze is focused on. It uses this information to continuously generating new patterns, colors, and shapes similar to what the viewer was fixated on, and renders them away from the center of the gaze. This way, the scene is constantly changing out of the field of view.
It’s like a choose your own adventure driven by your subconscious with no ending. It is both continuous and infinite. One person who continues where the another left off will start with the imagery generated by that other person, resulting in an experience shaped by all the people that used it before.
Classes
Electronic Rituals, Oracles and Fortune-Telling