←
→

Cycle 2–Allison Smith

Posted: April 7, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , |Leave a comment »

For my cycles, I’m working on practicing different media tools that can interact with movement. For this cycle, I chose to work with the interaction of movement and sound. Similar to my PP2, I had a song with several tracks playing at the same time, and the volume would turn up when it’s triggered. The goal was to allow a space to play with movement and affect the sound, allowing that to affect the movement.

This is the first scene, with texts that gave instructions to the participants. Feedback that I received from my previous cycle was to consider the audience and how instructions would be given in different environments. For this cycle, I wanted to make it as independent and “walk-up” as possible. The texts were triggered by a depth sensor, and after the instructions were done, it jumped to the next scene.
This is the user actor that tracked the depth of the volunteer to trigger the texts/
This is my text user actor that gave the instructions for the experience.
This is the next scene that was triggered, which has all of the music. The music was synced up and was triggered to play when the scene was entered.
This is a closeup of my music scene. I fed the motion tracker into user actors, which then went into triggering the volume of each sound.
Finally, this is an example of one of my movement user actors. Whenever the participant would go in the specific depth of the luminance key, it would trigger the volume to turn to 100, and when the participant would go in that depth again, it would turn the volume to 0.

I had two possible audiences in mind for this. The first audience I was considering was people who don’t typically dance, and who find this in a type of installation and want to play with it. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I’m curious about how completing an activity motivated through exploration will knock down inhibitions that are associated with movement. Maybe finding out that the body can create different sounds will inspire people to keep playing. The other audience I had in mind was a dancer who is versed in freestyle dance, specifically in house dance. I created a house song within this project, and I inspired the movement triggers based on basic moves within house dance. Then, the dancer could not only freestyle with movement inspired by the music, but their movement can inspire the music, too.

For this demo, I chose to present it in the style for the first audience. Here is a video of the experience:

Thanks to Orlando for volunteering and thank you to Yujie for documenting!

I ran into a few technical difficulties. The biggest challenge was how I had to reset the trigger values for each space I was in. The brightness of the depth was different in my apartment living room than it was in the MOLA. I also noticed that I was able to create the different boundaries based on my body and how I would move. No one moves exactly the same way, so sounds will be triggered differently for each person. It was also difficult to keep things consistent. Similarly to how each person moves differently from each other, we also don’t ever move exactly the same. So when a sound is triggered one time, it may not be triggered again by the same movement. Finally, there was a strange problem where the sounds would stop looping after a minute or so, and I don’t know why.

My goal for this cycle was to have multiple songs to play with that could be switched between in different scenes. If I were to continue to develop this project, I would want to add those songs. Due to time constraints, I was unable to do that for this cycle. I would also like to make this tech more robust. I’m not sure how I would do that, but the consistency would be nice to establish. I am not sure if I will continue this for my next cycle, but these ideas are helpful to consider for any project.

Leave a Reply

←
→