An interactive spatial sound, light and smoke installation for Red Bull Music, undertaken as a member oftypething collective. Several musicians collaborated to create the sound for this project, and are credited in the video.
Lighting design by Louis Shambles. The inclusion of capacitive touch was a contribution of mine. I also helped shoot the video, did the video editing, wrote one of the sound compositions, and put together the Ableton / Max MSP template that the musicians adapted for their own generative / interactive pieces. The video includes audio content from each of these artists.
”As you can see, it was an elaborate setup - glass orbs with light fittings in them were suspended from the ceiling of the space. Along with power, the orbs were fed with vapour from a large smoke generator, such that smoke appeared to pour continuously from the lightbulbs themselves.Also strung up were the large aluminium spheres, fitted with capacitive sensors, all wired into an arduino set to output midi notes. When the spheres are touched, as well as sounds being triggered, waves of light are sent rippling through the room, lighting up the smoke.The x, y and z positions of both the triggers and the lights were mapped into the system, and custom algorithms were used to dim the different lightbulbs in sequence, creating the effect of waves of light moving through the space, emanating from where the trigger originated. The room being filled with smoke really aided in this “volumetric” effect…
…Musicians were asked to create Ableton sets comprising ambient soundscapes, with four different channels each with a custom instrument of (their own) devising, alongside a further channel for persistent drone sounds which would play constantly… The midi notes from the touch triggers were fed straight into these ableton projects. Max4Live devices were used to map the repetitive notes onto melodic/harmonic structures. It was a lot of fun composing and sound designing for this unique situation. The incoming notes were randomized and fed through various filtering/mapping constructs to lock the eventual notes to a particular scale…”
