Migration and Morphing of Sounds in an Interactive Installation
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Sound and Interaction
Presentation Title:
- Migration and Morphing of Sounds in an Interactive Installation
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
This paper describes the techniques used in the realization of a Performance and Installation which explores the gradual “osmosis” between three different sound worlds: The song of swallows recorded at summer above the town of Corfu the song of Weddel Seals recorded in Antarctica (from the macaulay library of marine biology), and the emissions of short wave “Numbers Stations” recorded by amateurs all over the world (from recordings pubished by irdial). The sound recordings are segmented tools available in the SuperCollider sound processing environment and then the individual parts are analysed by several feature extraction algorithms based on fft data extracted by tools such as SPEAR and LORIS. Boid swarming algorithms are used to model the movement of samples in a parametric space, which is then mapped into simulated sound space with multichannel audio.
The sounds are transformed in real time by exchanging spectral characteristics through FFT-based processing methods, taking into account the previously extracted spectral characteristics. Several examples are given of the various ways in which the sounds are transformed. The work also includes graphics synthesized in real time based on physical models of particles and fluid modeling. Different ways in which the sound transformation technique are combined with the graphics and how they are contrlled in live performance as well as in an interactive installation are described. These techniques include various multi-touch surfaces ranging from iPhone or iPad to reactable-based technologies to open-handed gesture recognition from video input.
