Categories
Sound

An interactive sound waves building tool based on live video

The interactive sound waves builder was presented at the Helsinki Hacklab stand at WÄRK:fest, a DIY/Hacker/Culture -festival. The system consists of a small table, webcam and Max/MSP/Jitter process. Visitors were able to manipulate the sound waves by (re)arranging colorful objects on the table.

The table was simultaneously scanned in two dimensions, and the extracted data was used to create the sound waves, pitches and amplitudes for the oscillators. Besides the musical piece the rearrangement of the colorful objects created a transforming visual piece.

Categories
Art

Sonification of a graphical piece – Sounds of Calligraphy

The three pieces of Sounds of Calligraphy playlist are the continuation from the Sarana performance at the opening of Viiva & Viiru calligraphy group exhibition in Helsinki, Finland. The pieces are based on a real time process that analyzes the images in three color channels, and some of the oscillator sound waves are derived from the image properties too. The process has 128 oscillators and filters per channel, and they are positioned to the stereo panorama to exactly follow the figures. The resulting music is thus a true voyage across the image.

The sonification process was realized with Max/MSP/Jitter. A very warm thanks to the Viiva & Viiru group for their openness to the abstract.

Categories
Art

Mechatronic art decoration for a party

A mechatronic art decoration for Aortta Party by Hytky. Max/MSP listened for a beat and triggered Arduino, which in turn controlled an electric motor. The motor had a rod attached to it, and a cardboard heart was taped to the tip of the rod. The position of the rod was monitored with a hall sensor. Heart struck against a thin veil, which was illuminated with red light from behind.

Video: Oskari Niitamo.

Categories
Visual

Poster art for a global grassroots activist event

12M Poster Global Action Day Occupy HelsinkiThe poster art needed to convey the feelings of immediacy, internationality and determination, and especially the principle of universal humanism to which the so called Occupy movement is built on.

In the poster the main lines of history of the movement is presented all the way to the occupying of Finland. Besides the poster acts as the timetable for the event.

Categories
Art

Generative and interactive sound installation

AMBIENT² interprets the sound landscape of Harakka island in Helsinki into music into another language through a computer-abled generative process. We are born into a sound landscape to which we get used to through our lives and we take it as the familiar foundation, compared to which everything is strange and peculiar. It is about interpretation. When the same sound landscape is repeated as music something weird and unexpected is revealed. Video of the interactive sound installation.

Ambient^2 Generatiivinen ääni-installaatioMusic created by the AMBIENT² does not strive to fit its tones into any existing note system. It re-creates the frequencies of the source material by synthetic instruments as a spectral musical application. The final result is a musical work which never quite exactly repeats itself. The composer is the observed space which creates its own tonal system. The music thus created is not aleatory but determined by its own rules.

The basic form of the music is defined by ambient aesthetics, and in this case ambient sound creates the ambient music and the borders of music and the world are seamlessly intertwined.

The work was part of the La-Bas -biennale 2012 and it was presented at the sound art gallery Akusmata.