““Resonance of the Heart”: A Direct Experience of Embodied Sonic Meditation” presented by Wu and Ren

This paper presents the concept of Embodied Sonic Meditation (ESM) and its proof-of-concept art installation entitled “Resonance of the Heart.” ESM artistically explores the theories of “embodied cognition” and “deep listening.” The goal of this artistic practice is to improve laypersons’ comprehension of the relationship between body gestures, sounds, and visuals. To practice this approach, we designed and built a real-time audio-visual interactive system. This system uses an infrared sensing device and touchless hand gestures to produce various sonic and visual results. An artificial neural network was implemented to track and estimate the performer’s subtle hand gestures using the infrared sensing device’s output. Six sound filtering techniques were implemented to simultaneously process audio based on the gesture. Selected Mudra hand gestures were mapped to seven 4-dimensional Buddhabrot fractal deformations in real-time. This project was applied in both college teaching and public art installation. It connects Eastern philosophy to cognitive science and mindfulness practice. It augments multidimensional spaces, art forms, and human cognitive feedback. It disrupts the boundary between cultural identities, machine intelligence, and universal human meaning.