Production Piece

For this project I decided to revisit something I was working on previously and spice it up with some field recordings from freesound.org, some EQing, and heaps of convolution reverb. I originally made this piece as I was watching the sunrise and tried to capture that feeling.

An attempt at rave visuals in Max

An attempt at rave visuals – ESS Personal Project

Summary:

Earlier in the semester I attempted to make reactive rave visuals in Max and decided to continue with it for my personal project. I wanted to make something that was exactly in time to the music and ideally utilize older footage of people dancing (particularly my favorite video on the internet).

Max Patch:

The max patch takes midi input from Traktor(a popular program for DJing) which gets brought into the patch as a bang on every beat of the current song. This bang then causes a jit noise matrix to reconfigure itself. This noise matrix is laid over a jit video object which, on each bang, receives a semi random frame number to jump to from a drunk object. This causes the video to keep repeating certain segments while advancing overall.

Patch code:


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Screaming Go

Roles: Luigi Cannatti – Max Patch Programming and Audio Recording
Arnav Luthra – Documentation and Audio Recording

Max Patch Description: Our project utilized jit.cv to read a recorded game of Go and determine the number of pieces in each row. Using this data, we created a step sequencer wherein the number of pieces determines the intensity of the player’s “voice”. We used two different sets of sample banks for the white and black pieces respectively.

Sound recordings: Luigi recorded himself grunting, moaning, and screaming at 11 different levels of intensity. I recorded a few clips of a little sister and then filled in the blanks with a few grunting and breathing samples of my own.

Final Impressions: Overall we were both quite happy with the result. Our original intention with this project was to riff on the stoic nature of Go and I think we accomplished this well. To improve this further, we could have it working with an actual Go board.

Patch: https://pastebin.com/nyicKEH8

ESS Project 2 – Music from Blobs

Roles:
Computer vision programming – Dan Moore
Max Patch Programing and Sound Design – Kaitlin Schaer
Percussion Patch and Documentation – Arnav Luthra

Overview:
Our goal for the project was to create a live performance system that would create music from the act of drawing. To do this, we utilized computer vision to recognize shapes being drawn on a piece of paper and generate sounds in response to the shapes being drawn. We had three main “instruments” one of which was melodic while the other two were “whooshey” sounds.

Technical Details:
For the project, we ended up using two Max Patches and a separate instance of OpenCV. The computer vision processing was done on Dan’s laptop and allowed us to get the colors of various blobs, the location of the blob’s centroid (blob’s central point) and the velocity at which the blob was growing. We then took these parameters and send them over to Kaitlin’s laptop using OSC (Open Sound Control). From Kaitlin’s laptop, we took these parameters and used them to control an arpeggiator as well as resonant filters on the sounds. The arpeggiator added different notes within a fixed key depending on the location of the blob and then triggered two different midi instruments (the melodic saw wave and on the whooshey noises). The third instrument took white noise and applied resonant filters at a rhythmic interval to create a percussive effect. Parts of this patch were pieced together from various sources online and then compiled and modified to suit the needs of our project.

Video of final performance:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzxqdpE9VUgJR04xMjlsN0U3MHc

Closing remarks:
Overall our presentation went well despite a few technical difficulties in the beginning (We ran into some difficulties getting Kaitlin’s laptop to receive the information from Dan’s). We were limited in what we could do with the computer vision aspect but if we were to continue this project we could find other interesting parameters to get from the drawings.

Golan Levin Reflection

From Golan Levin’s really awesome presentation last week my main takeaway was the works of Norman McLaren. The audio visual works he showed us really caught my attention. Upon further research into his main years of activity were from 50s to the 80s which made me appreciate his work even more. The kinds of audio-visual art he was doing was extremely groundbreaking for his name, not to mention extremely difficult and time-consuming to create using the means available to him. With modern day computing, generating simple geometric visuals in time with sounds or music is quite simple(I’ve even made simple geometric music visualizations using max). McLaren’s “A Phantasy in Colors” was entirely animated with pastel and then the film was manually synced up to the audio. This level of effort and coordination is absolutely mind boggling.

Anyways, I leave you all with a really neat short film of his I found(apparently an Oscar winning film) with some really interesting sound work. Even though it was released in the 1950s all the sounds used in the film were synthesized.

Claustrophobic Soundfield: An Exploration of Claustrophobia Through Ambisonic Sound

The roles for the project were the following:

Nick Ericson – Max programming

Jack Kasbeer – Research and ideas

Arnav Luthra – Sound Editing & Documentation

Project Summary: To approach the project goal of making a sound space, we decided to literally create a space with an interactive sound piece. Our initial idea was to create a sort of “room” where a webcam tracks the movements of people within a designated space and triggers certain sounds based on their location. After configuring Jit and a webcam, we found that the space we had was rather enclosed and the software could only really track one person well. From that limitation we got the idea to try and create an experience of claustrophobia for a single person who enters the space. We mapped out our field recordings (which were edited in different ways) to different parts of the box deliberately using a mix of harsh and subtle noises to create a dynamic space.

Recordings:

Arnav: For my recordings, I set up the microphone in two environments: driving around in a car and cooking in my kitchen. In the kitchen I was making some noodles so I was able to get a crackling sound from the noodle package and then a crunching of the noodles as I broke them up. I also got the sound of onions sautéing in a pan. We tried to use these sounds as more textural background noises. From the car I was able to get the sound of a turn signal, some general engine and some ignition sounds. The best sound I got from the car recordings, however, was the sound of the car door closing. I took this sound, looped it and added ample delay to get a loud harsh thud noise which ended up being central to our piece.

Nick: Some of my top field recording acquisitions were the radiator in my girlfriend’s apartment, a rattling fan in a gates stairwell, and a creaky door spring. My recording method for stationary objects was to place the recorder directly next to the sound source and walk away for a few minutes.

Programming: The patch uses the cv.jit.track object to follow the participant’s position in real space and map that onto nodes. By clicking on the participant’s head as they enter the space, jit track continuously updates the patch on the location of the participant’s head within the space.
We then use the tracking data’s proximity to each node to determine the volume of looped field recordings that we mixed and spatialized with the hoa.2d suite.

Link to the Max Code

Nick debugging the max patch

Setup: The day before the presentation, we booked the media lab to setup and troubleshoot our project. We mounted a webcam to a beam in the ceiling of the lab and used a hefty amount of masking tape to secure it. We had some issues getting the webcam to work properly with Nick’s laptop and Max but we managed to get everything working in the end. Once we had everything working, we played around with the arrangements of the sounds in the space and made last minute edits to the sounds.

Nick setting up the webcam for the first test

Nick and Jack reinforcing the webcam with lots of tape

Presentation and Closing Remarks: Below are the videos we recorded of the brave participants in our project. Luigi’s interaction with the project was definitely very interesting!

Arnav: It was nice to hear in the reflections from our classmates that the car door sound was harsh and jarring as that was exactly the effect I meant for it to have. I really thought that the comments on having the space’s sounds evolve over time so that the participant doesn’t get “comfortable” were really valuable and if I were to continue on this project that is definitely something I would implement.