{"id":5833,"date":"2026-05-07T18:37:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T22:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/?p=5833"},"modified":"2026-05-07T19:21:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T23:21:51","slug":"pressure-project-3-love-letters-from-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/?p=5833","title":{"rendered":"Pressure Project 3: Love Letters from Home"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video height=\"1532\" style=\"aspect-ratio: 2544 \/ 1532;\" width=\"2544\" controls src=\"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/plz-1.mp4\"><\/video><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>This project was created as a purely audio experience, a three-minute piece with no visuals. It was meant to be cultural storytelling, but in the process of doing that, it became something very personal. Honestly, I\u2019m not even sure if I made it for anyone other than myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The interaction is built around proximity form the camera and the system. Using Mediapipe inside TouchDesigner, the system estimates the participant\u2019s distance from the camera based on the space between their shoulders. That distance is then mapped into three separate zones: near, mid, and far. Each zone triggers a different audio sequence of a minute long, creating a shifting soundscape as you move through space. The interaction is very simple but it gets complex in what it means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The zones are not just meant to be spatial, I also intended them to be emotional. The farthest zone holds the ambient sounds from back home. It contains sounds of a place I have very fond memories of, Liberty Market in Lahore. It\u2019s full of life, voices, interesting characters, and movement. It holds the ambient chaos and the unique life of a place that feels familiar when you\u2019ve lived inside it. Underneath it also runs the sound of a dhol, a traditional drum from South Asia which is often played during celebrations and festivals. The recording is from my wedding, which turns it into something both public but also secretly personal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The middle zone moves closer to the system and my life, into family. My parents asking if I\u2019m okay, telling me to take care of myself, giving blessings in the everyday way they do. There are also scattered pieces of time spent with my siblings, just being together, being absurd and being just us. There is also snippets of my dad telling us a ghost story around a bonfire. All of them are just small moments when they\u2019re happening, but they kind of accumulate weight as time passes, especially now that being together like that is rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The closest zone is the most intimate. It has audio of me and my husband. Snippets of our vows, pieces of our wedding song, voice notes he sent me from long distance of him singing to me, and also us singing together. The songs are in Urdu, which is our mother tongue. So music in this case, is not just background. It\u2019s part of how we stayed close across distance before we could be in the same room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The piece doesn\u2019t guide you or explain itself. You move, and it responds. What you hear depends entirely on how close you choose to stand, how long you stay, whether you move toward something or away from it. That felt like the right way to design this piece because that\u2019s how memories also work: existing in a very non-announcing sort of a way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I asked someone else if they would like to perform the piece (I didn&#8217;t feel like putting myself out there and I thought I would end up crying), and Chad volunteered. That did not go exactly as planned and it annoyed me because he was trying to figure out how the system worked and all of its interactions, and in doing so, he missed half of the experience. I realized I shouldn\u2019t have told someone else to give a performance for something as personal as this project in my stead, because it wasn\u2019t a puzzle meant to be figured out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I did what I had to, in order to fix the situation: I performed it myself. I may or may not have cried while creating this, but performing this made me so happy and I felt relieved to have done it \u201cproperly\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The most surprising part was that even people who didn\u2019t understand the language still felt something. Lou told me they got teary-eyed. That meant a lot to me. It showed that the piece wasn\u2019t just about language or culture in a literal sense, but about something deeper, and also obviously about the performance since they did mention that they could tell how much this meant to me while seeing me perform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If I develop this further, I want the zones to be less blocky, and to be more fluid and abstract, even floating around like memories. But even as it is, I really like this piece because of how much it means to me, and it does feel complete in a different way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This project was created as a purely audio experience, a three-minute piece with no visuals. It was meant to be cultural storytelling, but in the process of doing that, it became something very personal. Honestly, I\u2019m not even sure if I made it for anyone other than myself. The interaction is built around proximity form [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[51,61,89],"class_list":["post-5833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-pressure-project","tag-pressure-project-3","tag-touchdesigner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5833"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5997,"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5833\/revisions\/5997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dems.asc.ohio-state.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}