Creating an Art/Music Installation

11811

Hi Guys,

Im currently working on my final year project in college, which involves designing, researching and building what essentially will be an artistic and creative music installation.

The idea is that the user will be able to create music and visuals in an environment without having to touch any instruments etc..

Does anyone have any experience in this area or know of anyone working on something similar?

Just looking for any help, info etc.

Cheers.

studiorat

I know a bit about it.

How's your computer skillz?

EDIT> Actually download Pure Data.

Install it and go to the browser in the help menu and check out the GEM examples.

Figure out how to texture a shape with video or a regular image.

While you're doing that figure out how you'd like the user to trigger the sound and images.

Might be enough to get you started!

11811

Ah yeah, should mention the details, it will be run hopefully using max msp (which Im currently learning the ropes in) using motion senors as an interface.
My main area of concern really is link all this up with a DAW i guess so I can present it in 5.1 hopefully.

Also any folk around doing something similar?

TheBigRedDog

These guys might know a bit http://youtu.be/Ufro55cTp7w

madtheory

Getting the sensors to work with PD/ Max MSP is actually the easy part. The hard part is making an installation that's interesting i.e. as you put it the "artistic and creative" bit. For that, you should collaborate with/ interview a number of artists who do installations and find out what sort of things they'd like to do. So in a way you would be the engineer supplying a service to artists. At the very least you should research the art of installations. There's quite a bit of it out there in academia.

studiorat

interesting article on similar : http://www.csounds.com/journal/issue9/marginalia_tech.html

FlipperThePriest

I dabble in installation a fair bit. I find you can work your balls off on the complexity of the system, but if the interaction isn't constantly interesting people don't enjoy it as much. I try to create scenarios that constantly change/evolve. One example, last year I had set up an installation that interacted with the weather so it changed all day long depending on wind, rain, sunlight and temperature. I had a very complex system in PD and people did find it interesting but in retrospect the listening room was boring. It was just pretty much a shed with 2 loudspeakers. It would have been more effective if I had of hauled the stuff up a big tree or something... where it became part of the soundscape/weather itself.

I never did 5.1 but I often used 8-10 old car speakers in a stereo loop and the fact that there were different speakers (woofer, tweeters etc) all around the place it worked quite well in diffusing the sound around the space. I doubt if this would work for your needs though.

Arduino is a great little tool, go onto their website and go to "playground" (I think) to see examples of peoples inventions/works.

FlipperThePriest

OP I read this Organised Sound article (attached) and remembered your thread, interesting concepts with which to approach installation - especially interesting is the example of the author's installation toward the end.