Gene and I have come up with a few different ideas for the sound for Oceanic Scales. For now I’ve decided to go with the idea of using resonant filters that can be dynamically controlled by input from the rest of the system, moving from “pretty” harmony to more dissonance as the system shifts from balanced to unbalanced. The cool thing about the filters is that they can be applied to any sound. I’ve worked out the basic MaxMSP patch that could drive the dynamic filters and we have a MidiTron that can take physical inputs and convert to Midi messages. Unfortunately this means we’d be tied to a Mac running Max for the installation in SF…
Another (as yet unexplored) idea is to use sound files to emulate balance and imbalance, think soft waves, bubbles and lovely whale song for balance, boat engines and horns for imbalance. Arduino and Wavshield is limited to a single audio file at once, so it would be a pretty clunky option. Might be able to do something dynamic with a RaspberryPi, but the easiest is, again, a Mac running Max.
Gene and I also discussed the idea of using the vibrating motors he used on the initial iteration of the piece to resonate small pieces of aluminium inside each of the plankton bits. The physical sound generation is a cool idea but I worry we’ll run into issues with space to put the sound making devices inside each plankton bit, and overall volume…
I’ve attached the quick and dirty test of the resonant filter idea: WaterScales1
a short audio files that runs from balance to imbalance and back again. Interested to know if people hear the harmonic shift or not…
Sudhu
