breathe2infinity
For my final project in Interface Lab, I created an interactive audio sculpture titled breathe2infinity. The work contains an 8-inch subwoofer driver suspended in a 12x12-inch metal cage constructed of slotted steel angle. The driver is suspended by elastic cables. A handful of jasmine rice is scattered on the cone of the driver. Three potentiometers are attached to the front of the cube, which the viewer can use to control a low-pass filter, the volume, and the track selection.
In TouchDesigner, there are 10 audio tracks that I have created over the past 3 years. They are filtered before being output to a Yamaha receiver/amplifier, where audio is sent to the speaker driver.
A webcam is attached to the steel cube and aimed at the rice, feeding video to TouchDesigner, which outputs processed video to a screen behind the cube.
Flowchart of breathe2infinity technical specifications
The concept for this project more or less followed this order, from first idea to current state:
Suspended speaker driver that will rock up and down due to the movement of the cone
This did not work, as the fluctuation of the cone does not generate enough momentum
Suspended speaker driver that reflects light off of the cone and casts reflections on the ceiling
Suspended speaker driver that bounces sand in the cone in response to bass
This didn’t work either, since sand is so light that the cone would blast it too high and it would spill everywhere
Suspended speaker driver that bounces rice grains in response to bass
Suspended speaker driver that bounces rice grains in response to bass backed by a camera that is positioned towards the rice.
The final iteration of this project came together in just a couple days; after adding the camera to the cube, I realized how much I could accomplish with processing that video in TouchDesigner. In the end, I came up with a Rorschach-esque visual that periodically and coincidentally generates images that may look like faces, bodies, or sigils.
Captures of TouchDesigner output
The title of this project, breathe2infinity, is inspired by the “free-air” placement of the speaker driver. In conventional speaker design, free-air speakers are rarely seen, since nearly all standard speaker drivers are designed to be installed in some type of enclosure. When a driver plays in free air, the air pushed backwards and forwards constantly flows around the driver, causing the sound waves to cancel out in an extreme way. In this sense, I think of the speaker driver as a “breathing” mechanism that is unbound by any restraint, save for the four elastic bands suspending it.
Below are various images from the development stage of this project.
