There
are many numbers floating around us. Some of them are
important and meaningful to certain people and some
of them are not. Somebody might always look at the monitor
to see the continuously changing stock market values.
Somebody might look up the temperature value that goes
up and down hour by hour. Every 8 seconds, new life
enters the world and in every 12 seconds one life is
gone from this world. Everyday the U.S. Geological Survey
reports minor and major earthquakes and volcano activities
around the world.
By using this regularly updating peripheral number
information around us, I have created a simple sound-generating
platform for an improvisatory performance or an interactive
installation for gallery visitor’s performance. Each
player can adjust and mix the providing ambient informative
numbers as their own ways by selecting or slightly changing
values from the pre-recoded set of synthesizing algorithm.
Overall, the number information becomes each element
of orchestra that individually generates its own taste
of sound. The players also use the audio samples to
synthesize several sound waves dynamically and make
more complicatedly mixed sound. So eventually the combination
of the whole performance will creates harmonious music.
Technically the numbers that keep changing and
updating continuously are gathered into Processing application
in real time base from many websites through XML. Processing
delivers these numbers to Max application, and Max controls
the period, amplitude and frequency of sound waves to
generate sound. So this piece needs an Apple computer
running Max/MSP/Jitter and having Internet connection,
sound speakers and video projector.
This piece hopes to take the player and the audience
to the aesthetic feeling about life and death, happiness
and disaster, and private and social issue through immersing
into the various numbers. So this work intends to reveal
the existing but unrecognizable realm to the surface
of the water of the sensible world by bridging the domain
of social technology and new media art.
