Mike McCracken

This post is a bit belated, as will the next one be, but I wanted to put up a little about the piece that I put up in the People Doing Strange Things with Electricity show. It’s called Audible Avatar, for lack of a better name.

The installation consists of an overhead camera (with a fish-eye lens) that is connected to a computer running MAX/MSP/Jitter/CV monitoring the video input. The system monitors the input for movement and attaches trackpoints that follow the movement in the video around. This will, to a large degree, give the system handles on people moving through the space. MAX then sends OSC commands that report the position and idleness of the trackpoints to SuperCollider (running warp). SuperCollider is playing back a set of samples, each of which correlates to a trackpoint. But instead of just playing the samples back, it uses the position and idle time data to scrub to a particular position in the sample, pitch shift it, and adjust the volume. As participants move through the space, they are scrubbing and pitch shifting the samples the system has assigned to them. If a trackpoint winds up not attached to someone moving in the space, it’s idleness causes it to fade away and eventually be retired.

Hmm, this embed doesn’t seem to be working for me, but you can see the video here.

The audio samples are contributed into the system by people at a kiosk where you push and hold a doorbell button to record. The button and the recording light interface with the computer using an arduino. The light goes off after ten seconds as that is the maximum recording length. The microphone is connected directly to the computer and the button signal is detected by MAX and relayed to SuperCollider.

I intend to record more audio from it and include that.