soundSense: engineering music information was a collaborative multimedia installation involving the Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics and Communications, the Music Department, and the Information Sciences + Information Studies (ISIS) program at Duke University on November 18-19, 2004. The event was located in the CIEMAS Photonics Studio, a reconfigurable space instrumented with 20 wireless multidirectional infrared motion sensors, 26 computers, 9 speakers, and 50 19" LCD screens. soundSense was part of an ongoing experiment in sonifying information about aggregate human movement patterns within a space. As participants moved within the Studio, the sensors sent information, such as speed, trajectory, clustering, and moving limbs, to computers which translated it into musical tones representing various movement patterns and activity states. In addition to helping design the general concept and implementation of soundSense, I also created a 7-minute animation using Maya and Flash that explained the soundSense concept and technology and was exhibited on a 42" plasma screen near the main Studio entrance. All work is my own.
View a browser-based version of the animation.
Press coverage:
• "soundSense: Where movement and data are turned into music," Duke University Dialogue (11 February 2005) [page 1] [page 2] [page 3]