Adventure

Photo credit: Ellinor Gylling

Adventure is a spatial musical composition that attempts to enhance the experience of music as a place or a world. The art piece is not bound to any specific object. It is experienced when the auditor moves within the active space. The basic method in this project is to “unfold” the music within a space and thereby integrate distance and direction as musical parameters.

The traditional way to compose sheet music is based on the relationship between different notes on a time line. Listening to a linear piece of music can be compared to traveling in a one-dimensional room of notes, listening to the notes one passes along the way. In a "spatial" composition, time as a parameter is replaced by a second spatial dimension, making the music non linear.

When experiencing the composition, the musical information is not presented in a constant linear flow. Instead it is dependent on the visitor’s initiative. A possible analogy could be to compare reading a novel to looking at a painting. A novel (usually) demands that one reads word by word to understand the content. However, when looking at a painting one lets one's eyes wander over the canvas, unaware of what order one looks at the different parts of the painting.

How it works

A camera is installed in the ceiling looking down on the area where you want the sound room to be. It can be a webcam or some other camera that in combination with a video capture card can provide the PC with a video stream. The stream is intercepted by my software Sound Room Composer written in Java. The software analyzes the pixels around where a note is located and checks for changes in the color values.