king talk

This years overall winner at the Europrix Festival is the Whispering Table. A round black table, empty white dishes – nothing special at first sight. Approach the table and touch the dishes. You will quickly discover that they start to tell you personal stories about the symbolic meaning of food and rituals, related to four unique festivities celebrated by people of distinct cultures. By changing their position on the table and their distance to each other, you reveal new stories.

TheGreenEyl used different sensors and microelectronics for each module. Apart from the technical aspect, the most important part of this installation is you, interacting with this devices.

We’ve been working late to bring you this piece of audiovisual art. It has been created for an article that will appear in the next WEAVE magazine (should be out in early march), where we describe the making of it.

So, what is it you ask? It is an audiovisual composition that is based on a single set of MIDI notes. Those notes influence both music and graphics at the same time. We did not take the usual route of creating a piece of music first and then find some visualization for it; instead both elements have been developed at the same time. When we decided to change something with the graphics, the changes immediately influenced the music as well.

We find this approach most fascinating and are thrilled to explore it in more depth as soon as possible.

There’s also a Flickr set for this. Oh, and it has been done with Processing and Live.

Speaking of tangible interfaces for audio manipulation – Bug Labs recently released the BUGsound audio module! As with Siftables, BUG lets you connect various modules, but the BUG-approach is more for creating all sorts of gadgets, while Siftables are fully dedicated to music sampling.

Both are cool!

Music sequencing meets tangible interaction. After the well known BlockJam project from SONY labs (2002), the good people from the MIT Media Lab came up with this wonderful solution. It uses motion sensing, neighbour detection and wireless communication – cool AND buzzword heavy.

Actually I’ve been thinking about such a concept recently, when I re-discovered the Reactable, which is a nice synthesizer, but nothing like a sequencer. Well, apparently David and Jeevan from the media lab were faster once more. Kudos, and keep doing it right!

Oh, and there’s also a TED Talk about this!

via Digital Tools and Phlow