Weather Series – Wind

The wind of the sound

Consider language determines the culture of a certain place, which in turn determines population’s beliefs. Looking for the factor that is before language can lead to a discourse about the weather.

Atmospheric conditions must contribute to the formation of the psyche of people. They affect the shaping of the very language and sounds they use, and  the construction of beliefs they are engaged with. In other words, language must thus respond to the weather. So it is natural to think that different climatic situations result in different linguistic development. Although these factors should be all interwoven in a more non-linear fashion.

Weather Series – Wind

Weather Series – Wind is a multi-media art installation that tries to explore the manner in which the weather (wind in this case) changes and models who we are and what we believe in.

Wind is chosen as the first extract of a larger work, encompassing primordial elements of meteorology.  This is the first of the elements to be completed.

Liverpool based painter Andrew Foulds creates a depiction of the wind, in dialogue with the sound presented in the installation. These are both in response to a breeze produced with cooling fans floating overhead, in front of the painting.  All this produce the physical effect of wind, accompanied by sounds of swirling, images of the flow and abstractions of the same motif.

Wind – Andy

Through the audio in the installation, differences of languages are depreciated, emphasizing instead the common origins of tongues. The drone sounds, rhythms induced by nature and beliefs. These exhibit the similarities that exist over the globe between cultures, consistent through a variety of weathers. Proposing that, although changed, beliefs present archetypical sounds that seem to remain almost the same, and can be viewed through the prism of geographical effects. The wind in this case. The installation tries to blur the boundaries between ethnicities, and discover unity instead.

Altogether the work intends to create a micro-climate with its own theatrical setting describing these early notions of the interaction between language, the climate, beliefs and consciousness.

The installation won the first Camaradas UK & Mexico Art Competition, and will be next shown at PINTA Latin-American Art Fair, in June 2013.

Sound of Drones

One of a series of sculptures in Crosby, north of Liverpool.

It gets me thinking, Drones are the sound of structures of notes, repeated on a long harmony, and have been widely used by cultures. Now, the effect these transmit and why they attract me, is that of ethereal rhythms, longer than life, and existing in nature for us to capture them by modifying our perception of time.

With these ideas in mind I came to try some processing of sounds to bring to life sounds that comply with the perception of this natural occurring long rhythms.

While thinking about the sound of languages, and how they play a major part on the form of the cultures and personality of countries sharing the same tongue, I also stopped on the question of what the sound or rhythm of the entire human language phenomenon would be. I think of the persistence of time, and what it looks like from afar.

So, taking recordings that would show the typical sound of English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, French and Dutch, the languages I have been closer to (although I couldn’t find a proper recording for Lithuanian, sorry Liucija!), I mixed them all in Max/MSP, changed and looped them, changed their speed, applied LPFs and tweaked the parameters and bit-depth of the outcome. All this until I could find that organic like point that induced me into thinking about what the nature of the sound of languages and their significance, similarities and evolution.

The work is still to be further studied and explored though. Here is one of the outcomes, the link redirects to another website where the track is streamed.

Drone no.3

LED control at FACT

As a commission for FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool, I got to play with and hack the Noisy Table installed there.

Noisy Table is a creation by artist Will Nash. It takes a table tennis table and turns it into a music/sonic instrument, by capturing the vibration the ball produces on it.

With a set of sensors, the table uses Arduino to send MIDI notes to a Pure Data patch (among other synthesis software). This patch creates sound from the MIDI input. The result is an immersive experience in which the players have sonic feedback for their sportive accomplishments!

From there the idea was to create visualizations communicating with all this information…

Now, since all is coming out of the Table is MIDI data you are able to take it and do whatever processing to create visuals for a LED screen on the façade of the FACT. Such screen is a large 50×50 LED matrix that lights up at night.

By using Max/MSP, and using the sound coming from PD one can readily perform a Fourier description of the input signal. Then, by doing a series of scaling, a spectrogram can be shaped exactly to fit the screen’s dimensions on the façade,  and on the monitor of the computer that processes all this.

Also, the MIDI notes coming in describe (because of their pitch and channel) the position where the ball impacted. This works out to draw a ball or circle on either of the visualizations.

Finally, some scrolling text was rendered to be displayed on the front of the building only, as well as a visual animation of Conway’s Game of Life algorithm (already configured inside of Max, hence easy to modify!). These two screens start whenever nobody is playing with the table, a sort of standby mode.

In fact the visualization of the LEDs comes from a small screen of 50×50 pixels. All this imagery is all squeezed in this matrix, then send to the façade with a marvellous piece of code by Chris Nolan, from FACT, the screengrabber (!!). 

Here some pictures and should get a video actually…

This type of open projects is a modality I had not experienced, quite nice to hack, exchange, interconnect, destroy and create work!!!

LED current control

We address an improvement on current control to modulate intensity of LEDs.

As of the 20^th of November of 2012 the intensity of the LEDs for a specific Art Installation project was controlled with Pulse Width Modulation. Although working, given the characteristics of their use, they flicker when varying in intensity and frequency of activation.

We proposed a new intensity control by varying the current applied to the LEDs. Using this next circuit we accomplished that.

Circuit Schematic of the proposed circuit

The LEDs have a drive current of up to 350mA, which corresponds to a voltage of around or above 40V. For the purpose of the installation, we have power supplies of 48V.

To create a voltage controlled current we use a NPN transistor and an Operation Amplifier. By using negative feedback on the amplifier, we regulate the voltage applied to the transistor so that the current amplification keeps a constant relationship of

Current at R2 = Vcontrol/R2

By applying giving this negative feedback to the amplifier, and given its gain, we get a small current going to the Base of the transistor, controlling the passing of current from the Base to the Emitter. As said this last current is given by the formula above.

The first Op-Amp we used was the LM358P, but later changed to the AD708JN, because we wanted to improve the input voltage offset. This offset might be the origin of an undesired behaviour we observed in the Oscilloscope.

When a very low voltage is applied with a square wave as control signal, we observe a type of noise that makes the light of the LEDs to flicker. This can be due to the input voltage offset.

Another idea is that the magnitude of the gain of the op-amp can cause that small differences on the feedback are amplified creating this oscillation of the output.

The selection of the Transistor has not yet been optimized, as the one we use now seems to have problems with heat, although it works well for the sake of the firsts tests.

 

Spectrogram Application

By using the pfft object in Max MSP I created simple video source of 50 by 50 pixels (50×50 matrix) so it can be used as a control for a LED matrix of the same dimensions.

The process if very simple, by generating a subpatch with pfft, you can get the frequency bin that is being processed at the moment with fftin~, using the sound coming from the computer’s microphone. And from the same object you take the real and imaginary parts of the spectral analysis, with which you can get the amplitude and phase of such bin.

fftinfo~ gives you information about the current subpatch used by pfft~. So I took the Spectral Frame Size so to know the number of bins used by Max.

Screenshot of the patch

These numbers are given as signal streams, so they need to be processed with objects with the ~ symbol. And, by scaling them to a the desired range I used the jit.poke object to take this frequency analysis and modify pixels in a a jit.matrix. So, this matrix it displays a spectrogram with standard green to red colours, depending on the amplitude.

The scaling is as such because of the levels of the microphone, volume of the source, active frequency bins, etc. i.e. the frequencies on the upper side of the spectrum showed no activity so I discarded them from the final video output.

The right side of the patch contains the jitter components of the application, creating a matrix of 50 by 50, metro objects to draw and clear the screen, full screen and video and sound recording functions.

There is also some gate~ objects so that the X and Y coordinates are swapped and the visualization of the spectrogram changes from vertical to horizontal… just for the sake of it.

As I said, this low resolution video output is intended to control a large LEDs matrix of the same dimensions on the façade of a building, hence its simplicity.

Good for using in parties!

Donaueschingen – Musiktage

Donaueschingen – Musiktage

The Danube, very near from where it is said to be originated.

A couple of days ago we travelled to Donaueschingen, in the south of Germany, near Switzerland. The place, where is difficult to speak English, is said to be the exact point where the Danube has its origin, although looking at the place this seems like a not very truthful statement.

The reason of the visit was to join the team of artist Edwin van der Heide (1), and work on the installation of one of two pieces exhibited by him as part of the contemporary music festival “Musiktage”, held in that city since 1921 (2). This festival is considered as a connoisseurs encounter for the musical art expression, showing new, contemporary and experimental music/sound creations. And although the festival takes place on a small town, with a relative reduced audience, this fact highlights the target the event is directed to.

After the first working days of setting up Edwin’s installation, we had the time to watch one of the concerts within the festival. This (Helmut Oehrings “schienen wie Wellen die in lange Auge -2011-”) was a piece that showed part of the attitude carried by the festival. The sounds you could hear ranged from muted deaf-like guttural gestures, Arabic type guitars, to classical orchestra chords, passing through female soft and soothing vocals, strong choir expressions and metallic-hard percussive sounds which gave a severe strength to the performance at times. Held in Germany, one could get beer, pretzels and sausages with mustard outside in the time in between sections of the concert.

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The installation we worked on, called DSLE 3, is a synthetic (controlled) space directed towards the visual and sonic experience of audience in space (More information about this can be found on evdh.net).  The installation is completed on a square room of around 64 square meters, inside the Biedermann museum. It is basically one single 1.6 meters tall screen going around the room, lit by LEDs from the back. The LEDs’ intensity and colour, as well as the sound accompanying are controlled with great precision achieving the sense of spatiality.

During the set up of the installation

During installation

Following, the truss structure where the screen is hung from, floor and mechanical parts forming the installation are all hidden from view with black curtains, carpets and robes, so that the final result is total darkness, from which spectators can only see a wide band of light at eye level (the screen) that surrounds them. An eight channel speakers system is arranged below the screen, distributed symmetrically completing the audio component of the stimulus.

Finally, the experience that is produced is that of an immersive environment in which the audience submerges to be addressed through light, sound, and their movement in space, accomplished by varying  parameters that relates visual and sonic stimuli, corresponding not only to frequency and colour, but to speed and rotation of sound and light sources in space as well.

The composition of the piece presents clear and defined colours and sounds, which can induce a kind of trance in the engaged audience. The iteration of the accomplishment of the installation, serving as a tool to create, and refine ideas about stimulus, the installation itself and the content, make this provocation to be so straight forward that it seems to convey a transparent message, that cannot be expressed but with the language of the senses. It is difficult to document the experience, so I find support on some images and a short time lapse.

Just before being open for public

Video - Time Lapse – Installation Set up

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Pneumatic

The second piece we engaged with was Pneumatic Sound Field, also by EvdH. Of simpler installation, this work was composed of the same type of metal structure that supported 42 pneumatic valves up around 4 meters above the ground, distributed on a rectangular area.

Starting from the principle that sound is a change in air pressure, these valves open and close on a high resolution manner, liberating the pressurized air, flowing through the distribution hoses. The valves only possess two states: open and closed.

Pneumatic Sound Field with a castle as background

The sound that is accomplished this time is of higher density, and the exploration of it and the questioning of its source is a central figure that can be appreciated by standing below the metal structure, walking around the place, moving away from it and playing with the acoustics of the location. The fact that the sound source is so small (for the high loudness produced) and uncommon to our previous speaker-related experience with sounds, seriously works on the perception of sound.

Pneumatic Sound Field and the weather

For this particular case, the location was of great influence, to my taste, on how the sound is perceived. The outdoors installation was set on the side of the Biedermann museum, on a large open field, surrounded by trees and their autumn colours. The installation also faced the mansion in which the owner of all those lands lives, with only the Danube separating the sound structure and the castle. This was such a moving setting for an art piece, with nothing but fortunate good weather and sun bathing the audience, which grew numerous by Saturday and Sunday.

Again, it is hard to truly register the sound, its presence in space, and the overall experience of an experiment like this, take my enthusiast words as part of the documentation only. Pictures are used as aid; however, they will not suffice.

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We only got to see another piece, “Mostly Brittish”, free improvisation, which consisted of two laptops creating sounds with all types of synthesis and envelopes, generating a diversity of frequencies that cannot be easily described or digested unless you find yourself interested on the basic components of sonic items. Interesting though it was, hard to engage with nevertheless.

Towards the end of the 10 days we spent in Donaueschingen, what is to be appreciated as well is the opportunity of meeting people. People like Pierre Le Lay, who was leading the set-up of DSLE 4, a great Frenchman who earned our respect and appreciation at the same time, with whom we could talk about not only work, but the art behind croissants. Meeting people in the art business, and witness the infrastructure mechanisms and reality of the creative work happening, creative people succeeding at achieving liberation and freedom to develop ideas. Witness (and part of) of the art environment on a larger scale, its flora and fauna, intercommunicating.

Pierre in trance

1. Heide, Edwin van der. Edwin van der Heide. [Online] 2012. http://evdh.net.

2. Musiktage. Musiktage Festival. [Online] 2012. http://www.donau.com.

Counter in Max MSP using Java Script

So… I want to use Jitter to create objects and distribute them in the visual virtual space, and I need to create matrices with as many locations as objects I want to display.

These objects are to be assigned coordinates and dimensions. Since the objects will be distributed on a circular-like manner, I want to go through each position of the matrix and give it X and Y coordinates.

To address each of the positions of the matrix, (0,0   0,1, 0,2 etc) I decided to create a small routine using Java Script, since I was having problems with the logic in the patcher.

So, the small patch here contains a js object with a Java Script routine in it. This increases its count with every bang it receives, outputing the current values through the first two outlets, and outputing a 1 through the rightmost outlet when the count has reached its maximum.

The format of the counting is binary like, increasing x first until reaching its maximum, then reseting x and increasing y by one, after which x is incremented again until reaching its maximum and so to increas y again by one. This continues until both maximums have been reached.

The dimensions of the count can be modified by sending the message “dim x y” where X and Y are integers.

Here is the script: