Designed for the Motion Composer project in collaboration with Robert Wechsler and Infomus-Casa Paganini. The goal of this project is to create a device that transform movement into music for people with disabilities.

In this interactive instrument the mover’s activity controls the accents of an isochronic pulse. In this model a noise generator whose values are only either 1 or -1 is filtered with 18 frequencies which are exponentially distributed. This type of combination is very effective in order to produce sharp metallic sounds. Then a gaussian distribution is used to organize the percussion clouds.

Then the motion activity will affect also the height of the percussive sounds and the degree of order of this train of pulses. Thus the faster the movements the more the distances between pulses become unpredictable. The result is that the totally deterministic rhythm is transformed into a random one.

The body motion controls also the decay of the beats as well as their attack time. In this manner when the attack time is very long the pulses fuse into a mass. We have then operated a transformation from individuation to coalescence. All the sounds of this instrument are synthesized from scratch in supercollider language.

Category
Software