Fluidic

Hammersnail Sonic Research

Between April 9 and 14, 2013 the art installation „FLUIDIC – Sculpture In Motion“ was displayed in the Temporary Museum for New Design as part of the Fuorisalone in
Milan. The installation was designed and produced by WHITEvoid for Hyundai’s Advanced Design Center. Combining eight high-power laser projectors, a dynamic point cloud build out of nearly 12.000 spheres, interactions using six Kinects and a generative surround sound composition, WHITEvoid together with its team of collaborators brought the design philosophy of Hyundai to life and transformed it into a vividly poetic art experience.

Hammersnail Sonic research was commissioned to create a generative audio design for Fluidic. The goal was to build an audio system that is able to react to the generative and interactive character of the installation, enabling realtime sound modulation and realtime panning over six speakers to translate the visual movements into a spacial experience. Furthermore the system had to be build in a way so that sound could be changed in realtime following the interactions of the visitors, that were translated into OSC Messages coming from the Kinect sensors. The limitations of state of the art audio software lead us to write our own software tools to accomplish this quite ambitious requirements. The resulting Audio setup was put together out of three different pieces of software. To playback samples and enable an interaction with parameters of the sounds we composed and the instruments build we choose Live as an stable and reliable software. The communication and the generative heart piece of the setup are a set of custom made M4L devices. These devices are not only able to talk to vvvv (the software that generates and handles the visual part of the installation ) over OSC, but it also enables us to map nearly ever parameter we choose to control and manipulate the sound within Live and its instruments. As for the surround panning we developed a custom software written in Supercollider that connects to Live as well to the vvvv software, enabling a realtime panning over the six speakers distributed around the installation.

From a audio scenographic point of view we had to translate not only the visual character of the installation into music. The target was also to translate the design philosophy of Hyundai into a sonic experience. The composition for Fluidic contains no natural, concrete sounds. The idea was not just to sample nature but „interpreting“ nature and re-draw it with the help of modern tools following the design philosophy of Hyundai. The challenge was the design something that sounds bright, light, clear and positive but also atmospheric. We imagined a sound world that is light, clear but also atmospheric, poetic – and not static. Instead it should be always breathing and in motion – analog to the visual concept of the installation. All the sounds and instruments were designed especially for the installation with sensor-controlled analog modular synthesizers in combination with touch- controlled applications for ipad and sensors (theremin). In this way we achieved to design a sonic experience that sounds modern with an analogue and human touch. The generative composition was carefully matched to the acoustic conditions of the installation space to also integrate and make use of the natural acoustics of the space.

Team:
Concept & Realization: http://whitevoid.com
Laser: http://laseranimation.com
Audio Engine / Sound Design: http://hammersnail.com
vvvv Programming: http://checksum5.com