Pressure Project 3 – Webcam Theremin 2.0

For Pressure Project 3, we were tasked with refining Pressure Project 2 into something that could be shown at ACCAD’s open house honoring Chuck Csuri. In order create a more meaningful experience for this event, I changed a few things about my piece.

The first change I made was the sound of the “theremin”. Rather than have the sound be simply one voice that increased or decreased in pitch according to the position of a person’s hand, I programmed the sound to be triggered in a manner more similar to a guitar or harp, where instead notes are “plucked” as a person’s hand moves toward and away from the webcam and so can overlap as they decay to create chords. These “notes” are quantized to a very intentional scale and are treated with a variety of audio effects, such as delay/echo (before being imported into Isadora). A person interacting with the piece is invited to create their own path through the soundworld.

The remaining changes I made to the piece were visual. I altered the color of the generated Os to suit the feeling of the music (“cool” colors), and I slightly randomized the generation position as well as the movement of the Os through the screen space. In my view, this created a much more interesting and organic visual.