Pressure Project 2 – Webcam Theremin
Posted: December 15, 2023 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For Pressure Project 2, I decided to make a theremin out of a webcam!
For the visual component, I was inspired by one of Chuck Csuri’s works, his Structural Fragmentation 2021.
The Isadora patch I created uses the total brightness of the webcam feed to decide whether to play sound, as well as how high/low the pitch should be. The webcam is placed on a table looking up at the ceiling, and a person is encouraged to use their hand to interact with it. The idea was that the video feed from the webcam would be detectably darker when a hand was placed over the lens, and the closer the hand was to the lens, the darker it would be. The fact that the vast majority of webcams have automatic brightness correction complicated this idea, but it still functioned mostly as intended.
As for the sonic element, I recorded myself singing an “oo” vowel so as to continue with the theme from Chuck Csuri’s piece. This sound was pitched up and down according to the distance the “performer” had their hand from the camera. Unfortunately, I think the vowel ended up not sounding identifiably like an “oo” vowel, or like a human voice at all, and instead ended up just sounding like a synthesized tone.
Visually, the Isadora patch starts creating Os on the screen when a hand is detected by the webcam. The Os are created on the left side and slide to the right side as they dissipate over time, leaving a clear trail. The higher the pitch of the theremin, the higher the Os are created on the screen (vertically), and vice versa. The color of the Os is also shifted according to the pitch of the theremin.
