Week7 Assignment

Before I do my homework, there is a small episode happening. A bug flies in, and I hate them. But its speed makes me hard to capture its movement and kill it. So the solution is turning off all the lights except my desk light. As I have expected, it flies towards the light source and I successfully put an end to its life. 

And this somehow becomes my inspiration for the homework. Utilizing the OpenCV library, I build a thing capturing the movement of the light in the dark. And using it as the input, I am able to manipulate the audio piece. Here is the patch for it. The following threes are me making attempts to tune with it.

For the research part, I mainly look at Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works. I find his works very fascinating because it turns so many ordinary life things into music or audio performance. For example, this one, generating the video information from the CCTVs located around New York, and then turning them into a rhythm, reflecting people’s daily behavior influencing the voice of the city. I remembered there was another project, which makes huge noise, but in alignment with the metro and traffic noises. Though put in a very obvious place, it’s hard to tell that it’s actually making noise. These macro-scale projects are always interesting to experience since the determining factor, the collective behaviors are always so random and unpredicted.

This second piece using the combination of dust catchers and harmonica is also inspiring. His approach of bringing ordinary stuff to music somehow gives these dead machines lives. When they are wandering around in the museum playing a happy song. It will give you an illusion that they are in an enjoyable mood, loving their jobs. Putting into practical use, sometimes these machines will not react as we expect, and we will be unsatisfied with them, resulting in damaging them or kicking them. Under this circumstance, I suppose they will play angry music. So this provides us with a chance to reflect on the human-machine relationship.