orbiter - interactive sound environment

marcus • September 11th, 2007

The orbiter is an interactive sound environment by Vera-Maria Glahn and Marcus Wendt.
It invites you to reach for the stars and play their music!

Documentation

Download Documentation

» Medium / Large

Screencaptures / Play

» Polar Scene A / Polar Scene B
» Solar Scene A / Solar Scene B
» Sawtooth Scene A / Sawtooth Scene B

Photo Sets

» Kunsthochschule Kassel, Setup
» Kunsthochschule Kassel, annual exhibition 2007
» Microarchitecture Lounge exhibition at Tendence07, Frankfurt/Main

Description

The Orbiter takes possession of all senses. It is a place for visitors to lay down and relax, watching the firmament above them. With a small gesture, just pointing upwards, the visitor can insert new stars into orbit with unique visual and musical characteristics. The player is enveloped by the instrument; the music filling the ears, the body and space.

The dream of reaching for the stars is as old as mankind itself. The mathematics of planetary orbits, the perfection of natural geometrical forms fascinates scientists and artists alike. Even music principles as tonality or phase displacement are based upon computational ideas and find correspondency in the Orbiters structure.

The music is played on concentric circles, with higher tones on the outside, bass notes nearer the centre. The bigger you let a star grow before you pull back your hand to insert it into orbit, the louder it plays. Like the stars orbit on the large ceiling screen above the player, the surround sound orbits in the room on 4 high-tone-channels, supported by a bass box and a solid bourne sound speaker underneath the player`s couch, making low basses physically sensable.

Each version of the Orbiter features various scenes with different graphics, sounds and behaviour. Some create an illusionary nightsky firmament, playing more melodic or ambient sounds. Others experiment with the possibilities of graphical abstraction and rough synths, allowing you to even play drum’n bass-like sounds.

The installation is based on custom-built software using latest gaming and computer vision technology, performing real-time analysis of a camera image of the player as well as generating 6-channel-audio and video signals. The video analysis is written in C++, instructing SuperCollider for the audio generation, Processing for the graphics.

Links

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microarchitecture lounge

marcus • September 2nd, 2007

august 24-28, 2007 at tendence lifestyle/ international fair frankfurt/main

» projects & documentation

» microarchitecture.eu

THE MICROARCHITECTURE LOUNGE

Long live idleness!

Students from the Kassel School of Arts and Design have created seven unique micro-architectural concepts for this year’s Tendence Lifestyle in Frankfurt: unique spaces and environments to tear you away from the traffic of the fair. They invite without courting, they intoxicate without overexciting. They span a room in which you can spread out, stretch out your body and mind. Talking, playing, reading, making music, or just staring into the space are explicitly encouraged – whether it be by swinging inside “Hängeparty” (Michael Bohl, Marijan Severdija), by contemplatively ripping cardboard in “Raum 6” (Johann Schorr, Uwe Kramer, Timo Bäcker), being freed from your cell phone in the “Magnetfeld” (Aiko Telgen), a cozily padded rubble container installation, by listening to the sound of rain in atrium of “RegenBogen,” (Leonard Wilkop, Paul Ertel), by gazing at your personalized starry sky in “Orbiter” (Vera-Maria Glahn, Marcus Wendt), shielded under the cupola of “Umbrella Dome” (Denise Pacheco, Andreas Brethauer), or sheltered as if in snail shell in “Meerdinger” (Christof Binder, Veit Wolfer) which simultaneously offers a projection screen for images and dreams. The lounge invites its visitors to linger, relax, sleep, dream, and contemplate.

Two current chair prototypes, “Tuesday” (Jens Otten) and “Reversible Seat” (Annika Frye) will also be on display.

By entering the micro-architectures, you leave the main hall of the trade show behind. You lose yourself and dive into a world of other dimensions. Big and small blur together, the everyday disappears and meanings are relaxed but also sharpened by purposeful interventions.

This interdisciplinary group of designers, supervised by Oliver Vogt, Professor of Industrial Design, and Dipl. Des. Heike Lehrmann, consists of students of Product Design, Architecture and Visual Communication at the Kassel School of Art and Design / University of Kassel.

YouFM Clubnight Afterhour

marcus • August 12th, 2007

only about 2 months late, some documentation of our recent vj gig:
everything turned out much better than we expected thanks to Nils, his crew and their awesome location; a big cinema with a monster of a screen that gave our visuals enough space to compete with the music. awesome party!
merci vera for putting this together! :-)