Christine Chen-Looking Outwards-11

Above shows a video of Adrien Kaeser’s real time climate sound controller which he developed in 2018. Link: https://vimeo.com/292088058

While scrolling through the various projects related to computational sound art, I came across one that grabbed my attention- real time climate sound controller. Adrien Kaeser from ECAL, a university of art and design based in Renens, designed this sound controller. This device utilizes aspects of real time weather to alter and control the designed music instruments. The entire device is composed of two major parts- a weather station on a tripod microphone and a custom-built controller connected to the weather station. The weather station receives and senses weather information and passes it on to the controller. The controller transforms the data into one that can be interpreted by instruments. The user could also alter the device, through modifying qualities such as amplitude, to control the output of sounds. The device is made with Arduino mega, Arduino leonardo, Weather Meters, SparkFun ESP32 Thing Environment Sensor Shield, ESP32, SparkFun MIDI Shield, High Speed Optocoupler 6n138, Encoder rotary knobs, Colored buttons and Arduino TFT touch screen. Software includes Arduino, C++ and MIDI protocol.

What I love most about this project is how the creator utilizes weather, the state of the atmosphere at a place and time, into another abstract form which gives people a different experience. It is as if weather is compressed into an audio form. Through allowing users to alter the sound through the controller, the creator make sure that generated sound would not be entirely random and create a composition of muddled music. The controller helps user to alter the output to form sound that is pleasing to them. It is just inspiring to see how such a large, incontrollable data could be transferred and transformed.