Category: LookingOutwards-04

The project I chose to write about is Weather Thingy by Adrien Kaeser. It was made in 2018 with help from Cyril Diagne, Gaël Hugo, Christophe Guignard, Laura Perrenoud, Tibor Udvari, Pietro Alberti, and Marc Dubois. The project is a sound controller that uses the weather to make music. The device converts things like rain, wind, and sunlight into midi data which instruments can then interpret. It gets this data with its rain gauge, brightness sensor, and wind anemometer and vane. The other part of the piece is a controller that’s responsible for the transforming of the weather data.

• I really like the idea of incorporating natural events into manmade activities. The device allows for there to be input from the musician but also allows for a significant amount of randomness from the weather. I like the idea of mixing natural and manmade things because they are essentially opposite things, so having them brought together to create something pretty is a nice idea to me. The random aspect to some of the music is interesting as well. Leaving some stuff up to chance is exciting because no one can really guess what the end product will sound like. 
• I don’t know much about the algorithms that generated the work. However, I assume they are moderately complicated. Kaeser would have had to assign certain notes and other musical aspects to certain wind speeds, direction, and brightness.
• The artist seems to have a minimalist aesthetic. I assume this because the final form is very simple yet effective. The video demonstrating is also minimalist looking (although I don’t know how much creative power he had over that). If the music he creates is counted as part of the final product, then it also shows his artistic sensibilities. He is able to play his own notes on the keyboard that he came up with, with the weather music added to it. Also, the different weather events cause different kinds of sounds, so he obviously imagined those events sounding a certain way and then incorporated that into the product.

TuneTable (2016) 

By: Xambo, A., Drozda, B., Weisling, A., Magerko, B., Huet, M., Gasque, T., and Freeman, J

TuneTable demo in Museum of Design Atlanta 

TuneTable is a project that provides an interactive tabletop application to teach basic computer programming concepts. Users can compose short musical snippets with visual displays by arranging the blocks in different locations to build chains of blocks of code. I admire the fun aspect of creating a learning activity for kids and also how easy it is to make music and visuals without having to think very hard. For the algorithms, I think the blocks placed on the table have special outputs based on where it is placed and also the rotation of it. The creator’s artistic sensibilities comes into play in the musical and visual algorithms created for the blocks that get put down onto the table.

Sonic Playground is an outdoor sound installation that was created by Yuri Suzuki in 2018. This project was made for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. It features 6 interactive, playful and colorful sculptures that modify and transmit sounds depending on where the participant is standing, listening or speaking. Using horns and pipes the computed acoustics travel from one end to the other in a playful way and by kneeling down or sitting between two pipes one can hear the that sounds are transported from different parts of the sculptures, which creates a fun and unique listening experience.

I find this project interesting because it made use of a software that I am learning now – Grasshopper (as a parametric plug-in for Rhino). The code that was written for this is a 3D raytracing tool that allows the user to select a sound source and send sound in a certain direction or towards a certain geometry, in this case the shape of the acoustic mirrors or the bells at the start and end of the pipes to see how the sound is reflected and what is the interaction with the object. 

Dave Young’s “Radius Music”, released in 2010, is an audiovisual device that reads the ultrasonic distance from those that are in the room to the device itself, conducting additive synthesis to create audio and placing light beams on the floor in response to that distance. This project is admirable because of its ability to conduct complicated audio synthesis techniques on the fly, based on feedback it may have never dealt with before. I would imagine that the algorithm maps distance to pitch in some way, but I’m not sure what affects timbre, tempo, or anything else for that matter. Regardless, it seems super cool!

Apparatum is a custom made apparatus with digital interface that emits purely analogue sound. I admire the project because it takes inspirations from earlier studios and musician, then gives it a modern twist. The physical form is inspired by Polish Radio Experimental Studio, which uses magnetic tape as primary medium. Musically, it is inspired by Boguslaw Schaeffer, who conceived his own visual language of symbols that conveyed the cues for sound engineers. 

The creator, panGenerator, utilizes electron (node.js) and c running on teensy 3.2 to generate  interface and micro-controller elements. Creator’s artistic sensibility manifests by borrowing from Oskar Hansen’s “Black Room.” The original design was generated more than 100 years ago, yet panGenerator is able to add touch screen and modern studio elements to create a chic apparatus. The black and white combination would easily catch consumers and artists’ eyes today.

Link to original source is here.