This quad project is an experimentation of the setup and idea for my final piece.
Chance operation master John Cage once said, “We have a faith that each of the things happened is the best thing that could happen.” Historically there have been numerous pieces created by greatest musicians using the system of randomness. Hayden and Mozart have composed by randomly arranging their musical materials based on the result of rolling a dice. Inspired, I wanted to create a system where different qualities and locations of sound generated are solely dependent on the action of dice rolling. Different from Mozart or Hayden’s approach, I skipped the step of manually translating the result of rolling a dice to corresponding composing materials. With the help of technology, I will have sound generated synchronously based on where and what angle the dice is landed in space and which side of the dice is facing up.
My programs of choice are Max/MSP and reacTIVision, a vision framework that tracks objects’ locations by their unique fiducial IDs with a webcam. I made two cubes as my dices with an ID on each side. I connected 4 speakers using a Motu 4pre audio interface and arranged them in a square/circle facing inward with equal distance between each speaker. Listeners and dices are placed inside of the square. A Logitech USB Webcam is hanging from the ceiling pointing down at the space inside the square. Listeners can roll the dices anywhere within the circle and generate sound. The multichannel set up will enhance the orientation of the space.
Quad setup
Automate movement in ambimonitor
For this project, I recorded random fragments of sounds from the album “The Ready Made Boomerang” by the Deep Listening Band and set the recording volume very high, therefore, the sound being recorded is reflected back into recorder which caused distortion feedback and strong echo and sounded nothing like the original tracks. I then looped this recording with equal amount of gain on each channel as the background material. I had each fiducial ID mapped to a MIDI note to trigger an FM synthesizer on a Max Patch. The x and y coordinates of the IDs are controlling the location of the dots, which represent sound source, on the left ambimonitor. Given this is a piece explores random music creation, I picture my sound to convey the sense of disorder, but the goal is to generate a system with deliberate material choices that hack the complete random result to find a balance between the disorganized and pleasant sonic quality.
Improvements:
The webcam I used is 30 fps. When I moved the cubes too fast it would not detect the IDs. Therefore I’m considering using a dSLR camera as my webcam to get up to 60 fps so it’s more sensitive to the motions.
I would also increase the size of the dices to roughly 1.5 ft^3 to accommodate the size of the venue and the height of the ceiling, and have more cubes and moving objects with IDs attached, to create more variety of sounds.