Sydney Salamy: Looking Outwards-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.