For this project I wanted to focus on the idea of being alone in a crowd. The idea is that often when we are vulnerable in public spaces like parties, our deep personal moments become part of the cacophony around us and become indecipherable.

This patch is designed to be set up as an art installation in a space like the media lab. The computer running the patch, a microphone and a camera would be positioned in a closed space like a photo booth near that space and spectators would be directed to first enter the booth and then the performance space. In the booth they would be asked to tell something personal to the microphone, and press a button when done, then enter the space to observe the performance.

In the room whatever the person said will be convolved and played from one section of the room, then convolved again and moved to a different section and so on and so forth 4 times. After that time, their secret would find a resting place in one of the four corners of the room, where it would loop and slowly decay over time. On a screen in the room a video feed of people saying new secrets would be played, but in that feed is feedback of video from previous people telling their secrets such that they all blend into a kind of anonymous person approximate. After a few people have used the system the overlapping sounds and convolution would make it impossible to make out what anyone said or who said it, creating a sonic soundscape completely out of personal moments.

A few notes, do make this installation more flexible the IR signal used is variable and must be set at program startup, there is a simple drag box. Additionally, there is 1 button to turn on the microphone and camera, and a second button to indicate one person is done speaking and the next has begun such that their voices get bounced around independently.

The current version of this relies on 8 channel output and the ability to send signal from the booth to the room. If given more time I would love to find a way to transmit this data over the internet from one max instance to another allowing this installation to be set up with less equipment. Similarly, to make it more accessible I would look into using 2 channel output, but 3d sound techniques to create the illusion of directional immersive sound.

A small sample of the what this would sound like can be listened to here, but it really only makes sense in the surround sound live space and this is a 2 channel recording.

The patch is hosted at https://github.com/dtpowers/Secrets

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I actually created a presentation mode for this patch so I encourage you to check that out if you are running this patch yourself, it’s not pretty but it simplifies the system to just the important parts.