Project Audio Introduction

I did an audio introduction to this project.

heres the video:

video presentation

I have done a video presentation to the project to wrap up everything from stage one.

here is the video:

Artist Statement

Adding Documentation

We haven't done some stuff for the documentation. So I redo some of the wrong documents and add some more from Stage 3 to Stage 5.

Stage 3

 

Stage 4

 

This is the Interface Design (Blue Print)

This is the Action Script which I took it from Ziehen and add it to the documentation

Stage 5

 

 Artist Impression

Microphone detection testing

Here is the microphone detection on motion (sound or action) to play animation of the heart shape using flash

version 1:

version 2:

software testing

This is the testing session I did to trigger light and sound using the software "Webcam Zone Trigger".

This is video of replacing the default sounds with the piano notes recorded using the Mac Book earlier on.

Gantt Chart

Gantt Chart

As for our project, this is the schedule on what we need to do and when will we do it. We'll follow this time table to make sure everything goes smoothly. 

Software

Softwares that we are going to use:

Webcam Zone Trigger
General purpose for this software is for sound and motion detection. We are setting the hot spot so that the camera will detect and produce sounds (do re mi fa so la ti do).


Flash
It's for the heart shape animation which when the sound triggers, the heart shape will blink. It symbolizes the happiness that we feel and excitement of our heart beat as we heard the sounds while playing with it. The heart shape will be surrounding the boxes so it will be easy for the users to see. Plus, it is like an attraction too.

Sound File

This is a video on how I saved each sound file (do re mi fa so la ti do) differently. I used the garage band from Mac since it has grand piano which makes the do re mi sound more similar and easy to identify. These sound files are going to be used in the Webcam Zone Trigger software for the sound that will come out when we flash the light on the boxes.

TESTING PROGRAM

We have tested the program Webcam Zonetrigger to see if the light from the torchlight will be detected from the webcam.

Here we have documented it :

PROGRAM

To detect the light so that the sound will be heard we are using this program called :

Webcam zone trigger

ACTIONSCRIPT

Here are the action script for the sound detector:

myMic = Microphone.get();

attachAudio (myMic);

micInterval = setInterval (this,"micCheck",30);

function micCheck (){

micLevel.bar._xscale = myMic.activityLevel;

kokyong._alpha = myMic.activityLevel;

}

Idea Developement

Here are the detailed view of the installation with measurements.

top view.(total area: 60 inches x 51 inches)

front view.

back view.

left view.

right view.

for each box:

each box are covered with red and white alternatively, and boxes are made of newspapers.

FINAL PROPOSAL

PROPOSAL

Research Topic: Happiness, Sound & Light

Problem Identification: To understand how sound and light can trigger feelings

Aim & Objective: To create interactive installation art project that can express happiness when interacting with the project.

The allow people to play and interact with the project and entertain them and make them feel happy.

It will also a will make people more relax and enjoy interacting with the project without worrying about anything else.

Motivation: The interactive installation project will make people want to try and make music when they use the torch light at the different part of the box this will motivate them to make a song or a tune and they will feel satisfied when they achieved their goal

Ideation & Concept: This is having an installation with the boxes arranged in heart shape, covered with red cloth. Each box is a tone of a piano key, when user shines the light on the box, it will play the tone out loud, creating a series of piano keyboard or allowing user to create a music piece through this installation. Reason why it is done in love shape is to indicate the feel of love and with the red cloth to support the lovely kind of feeling. Adding to music tones, it creates a harmony and rhythmic atmosphere. Flashing lights on boxes raises curiosity in user to explore every box. This may allow user to have fun and feeling happy and enjoyable in playing with this installation.

Venue of the project

We decided to use the class DR2002 for our project as it suits our needs: the class is dark and occupy large space.

This is the classroom

The front part of the class. We chose to use the center part of the class.

This is how the class looks like when it is in total darkness.

Idea Developement

This is ideation no.1

This is done in a dark room where user have to use the flash light to shine on the boxes arranged on the walls. Each box when light shines to it, it will play a tone of a piano key to indicate the tone of sound. User are supposed to stand within the lighted heart platform. The lights will light up when sound is being played. So in this case, user can have fun shining over the boxes to come out with rythms or music that they like. They can explore the keys around and manipulate from there. Exploration creates a sense of humor in user and this will make user have fun and enjoy playing in the installation.

This is ideation no.2

This is having an installation with the boxes arranged in heart shape,covered with red cloth. each boxes is a tone of a piano key. When user shine the light on the box, it will play the tone out loud, creating a series of piano keyboard or allowing user to create a music piece through this installation. Reason why it is done in love shape is to indicate the feel of love and with the red cloth to support the lovely kind of feeling. Adding to music tones, it creates a harmony and rhythmic atmosphere. flashing lights on boxes raises curiosity in user to explore every boxes. This may allow user to have fun and feeling happy and enjoyable in playing with this installation.

People love music for much the same reason they're drawn to sex, drugs, gambling and delicious food, according to new research. When you listen to tunes that move you, the study found, your brain releases dopamine, a chemical involved in both motivation and addiction.

Even just anticipating the sounds of a composition like Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" or Phish's "You Enjoy Myself" can get the feel-good chemical flowing, found the study, which was the first to make a concrete link between dopamine release and musical pleasure.

The findings offer a biological explanation for why music has been such a major part of major emotional events in cultures around the world since the beginning of human history. Through music, the study also offers new insights into how the human pleasure system works.

"You're following these tunes and anticipating what's going to come next and whether it's going to confirm or surprise you, and all of these little cognitive nuances are what's giving you this amazing pleasure," said Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. "The reinforcement or reward happens almost entirely because of dopamine."

Music to Your Ears?

"This basically explains why music has been around for so long," she added. "The intense pleasure we get from it is actually biologically reinforcing in the brain, and now here's proof for it."

In a previous study, Salimpoor and colleagues linked music-induced pleasure with a surge in intense emotional arousal, including changes in heart rate, pulse, breathing rate and other measurements. Along with these physical changes, people often report feelings of shivers or chills. When that happens during a listening experience, Salimpoor's group and others have found evidence that blood flows to regions in the brain involved in dopamine release.

To solidify the dopamine link, the researchers recruited eight music-lovers, who brought to the lab samples of music that gave them chills of pleasure. Most picks were classical, with some jazz, rock and popular music mixed in, including Led Zeppelin and Dave Matthews Band. The most popular selection was Barbar's Adagio for Strings.

After 15 minutes of listening, scientists injected participants with a radioactive substance that binds to dopamine receptors. With a machine called a PET scanner, the scientists were then able to see if that substance simply circulated through listeners' blood, which would indicate that they had already released a lot of dopamine, and that the dopamine was tying up all available receptors.

Referrence:

http://news.discovery.com/human/music-dopamine-happiness-brain-110110.html

Research-True Happiness

Happiness is not obtained by having a lot of money, or a new car, more vacation time from work, or a really satisfying job. These things are what we want as we believe that these things will make us happy. Actually, it is not the money or the vacations that count. It is about the freedom of making choices in life that will make us happy-freedom to make decisions in every single thing in life. So really, what it comes down to is that every want in life equates to something that will make us happy, and satisfies our own personal definition of happy. [alshappyplace.com. 2011]

“Needs”, “have tos”, “shoulds”, and “musts” these words make us feel that it is necessary for us to do a certain things being told. However, when the word “should” is put, people always intend not to do it, but at the same time, it also tells people that as if they have no choice. Rarely people will come to realize “what if I don’t?”

Hence, it is not about materials or achievements that will make us happy, it is about fulfillment. Relationships matters the most in a human’s life. Because, life is about relationships. Having good relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and so on with definitely makes people fill satisfied and happy in living. It will also make people fill worthy to live. We live in a mobile society, where people follow jobs around the country and sometimes around the world. We do this because we think increases in salary will make us happier, but the fact is that our relationships with our friends and family have a far greater impact on our happiness than our jobs do. So next time you think about relocating, consider that you'd need a salary increase of over $100,000 USD to compensate for the loss of happiness you'd have from moving away from your friends and family.[4] But if your relationships with your family and friends are unhealthy or nonexistent, and you are bent on moving, choose a location where you'll be making about the same amount of money as everyone else; according to research, people feel more financially secure (and happier) when they're on similar financial footing as the people around them, regardless of what that footing is.[ www.wikihow.com. Krystle C., Jack Herrick, Slackwalker, Alan J.]

Referece:

http://alshappyplace.com/index.php/want-to-vs-need-to/

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Happy

L.Kai Wen. 2011

More sketches

We can either put the stuff that triggers the emotions on the table (so that user can flash the light) or just simply let it be anywhere so the user can search for it.

Regarding to our idea, this is just what we need, flashlight and things that triggers the emotions and feelings. After both things are ready, all we need to do is set up the sensors.

RESEARCH

WHY FLASHLIGHT

Flashlight torches are cheap, robust, familiar and fun and so make interesting devices upon which to base interaction technologies. Computer vision software has been developed that can recognise and distinguish between different flashlight beams and these can be used to activate digital media including audio, video or special effects. The technology appears to ’magically bring to life’ objects and areas of the environment merely by shining a torch on them and has been used successfully to enhance visitor attractions such as museum exhibits and displays.


THE PROGRAMMED THAT CAN BE USED

The Enlighten interactive flashlights system
Flashlights are excellent tools for exploration and discovery, particularly in darkened environments, and the pools of light they cast focus attention and provide immediate topics for discussion. They are readily available in a variety of physical forms (sizes, shapes weights, powers and designs) and mountings (including handheld, head-mounted, stand mounted and vehicle mounted). They are also relatively safe, in terms of being shone into eyes and onto delicate surfaces. Enlighten is a novel interaction system that uses ordinary flashlight torches to explore and interact with displays and objects in the environment. The user simply shines an ordinary torch over the surface of interest. When the torch beam is positioned over one of a set of pre-defined targets, the system recognises the flashlight and triggers the appropriate system response (Benford et al. 2004). Responses can include any computer-driven effect such as playing an audio recording or video sequence, switching on a machine or triggering a special effect.
A key advantage of the system is that there is nothing special about the flashlights or the interaction surface used and there is no need to attach any sensors, transmitters or other devices to the surface. Enlighten uses computer vision techniques to identify and respond to different flashlight beams. This means that the system is portable and can be positioned in almost any environment. All that is needed is a standard desktop PC or laptop, Enlighten software, a standard web-cam and suitable flashlight torches (Figure 1). Use of standard equipment ensures that the system is affordable and readily available. The main constraint that affects Enlighten is lighting. The computer vision techniques underpinning Enlighten require the local illumination to be fixed, or vary only slowly. The technology may not be suitable for some environments, which have very bright or highly variable lighting.

Enlighten also requires space to mount video cameras so that they can get a sufficiently wide and interrupted view of the surface of interest. To date, the most common use of Enlighten has been to trigger audio responses, and the current version of the software reflects this. Enlighten consists of two key components: a configuration system for interactively defining targets and flashlight torches and associating them with sound files, and a run-time system that detects and tracks flashlight beams and triggers the appropriate sound file whenever one hits a target. Configuration begins once the camera is in position. A familiar and simple graphical user interface is used to set up configuration of an interactive experience. The main control panel allows access to different modes of configuration including camera selection, target creation, sound selection and torch training (Figure 2).

A user can create target zones in the visual scene by simply ’drawing’ boxes over image that the camera sees. These target zones can be repositioned, resized or removed using standard cursor click and drag techniques. In sound selection mode, the user clicks on a target zone to open the ’sound selector’ window specific to that target zone (Figure 3). Sound files can then be attached to the target zone using standard drop-down menus. Once the targets are defined, the system is trained to recognise the torches to be used. The user simply plays each torch in turn over the surface while Enlighten extracts and stores a description of up to 10 different torch beams. Torch 1 is used to activate sound 1 assigned to each target, with subsequent torches activating subsequent sounds/audio files accordingly.

Figure 4 shows a pair of torches being used to interact with a poster showing the planets of our solar system (Green et al. 2004). Figure 5 shows the two flashlight beams extracted from the image sequence. Enlighten detects, describes and recognises the individual torch beams (labelled as Class 0 and Class 2). In this demonstration system torch 0 triggers children’s spoken descriptions of the planets, while torch 1 triggers samples from Holzt’s PlanetsSuite. Key features of Enlighten are that it: - Is easy to use: Enlighten is very easy to learn and simple to use - Is child friendly: Flashlights are especially appealing to children - Is entertaining: Enlighten creates magical experiences in which everyday flashlights bring ordinary surfaces to life - Is personalised: Different flashlights can trigger different responses, providing personalised experiences for different users - Supports exploration and discovery: Flashlights offer the ideal means to explore dark areas. Shine a flashlight over a surface to reveal specific features and activate multi-media explanations and information about these features -Supports shared interaction: Several flashlights can be used together providing an interaction experience, which can be shared by groups. Different responses may be triggered by each flashlight, providing a montage of effects to be explored collaboratively

Enlighten has been installed in a variety of situations. An early version was used to allow children to interact with projected graphics within a StoryTent (Green et al. 2001, see Figure 6). In the first large-scale public trial visitors to the caves beneath Nottingham Castle used Enlighten to access audio clips describing the history behind key features of King David’s Dungeon (Ghali et al. 2003, see Figure 7). Approximately 150 visitors used the system over a two-day period. Lessons learned from these installations led to technical improvements to the system, which was then used in interactive storytelling sessions with groups of 4 - 7 year old children and a professional storyteller at the 2004 Nottinghamshire Show (Reeves et al. 2006). Enlighten has recently been commercialised, and a number of installations are currently underway in the museums and heritage sector (www.visibleinteractions.com).




How can make flashlight work with sound:

Figure 8 Mapping physical targets to media objects

The model in Figure 8 is a comparatively simple illustration of the most common use of Enlighten to date:

using flashlights as a direct control interface to activate pre-recorded audio files. However, the system is more flexible than this and is also capable of varying responses over time. For example, Enlighten can be configured such that target N only responds to torch 1 after torch 2 has accessed target M. Alternatively, target K may play audio clip X the first time it is accessed by torch 3, but video clip Y thereafter.



Reference:
http://www.icdvrat.reading.ac.uk/2006/ArtAbilitation/Proceedings_Complete/Cobb.pdf


Here I have found a similar concept to our idea, it does not use any flash light but it does detect light and sound will be produce.

HIROSHI MATOBA [JAPAN]
INSTALLATION "DENKI DOMINO"
INSTALLATION "DENKI DOMINO"
DENKI DOMINO is a new composition system for visual and audio sequences.
"DENKI ("d‹C)" means "electric". DENKI DOMINO is small boxes implemented LEDs,light detector, micro computer, and small speaker. Each DOMINO reacts to the light. When DOMINO receives the light, it makes a small sound from itself and turn on its led light. Each DOMINO is just a box which make a sound and light, but when we put it like a "domino toppling", the sequence of sound and light happen to be generated. In addition, we can make a musical loop by putting DOMINO as circular layout. DENKI DOMINO enabled us to grab the sound by hand, put or pile
on floor like a musical score and play in real time at real space.

BIO
Hiroshi Matoba was born in Japan in 1983. After undergraduate course of product design, now he is studying sound art and programming at the Kyushu university and ADCDU. His interest is focused on making a new sequence system for music. Recently he try to make a original circular software and hardware sequencer instead of throwing away a traditional liner sequence system.
These system make his original audio and visual performance and installation.
Transmediale award 2009 [Nominated], International festival of electronic art 404 [SELECTED], BACA-JA 2008 [Network Art: Grand Prix], Asia Digital Art Award 2008 [Interactive art: Finalist Prizes].




VIDEO:

http://vimeo.com/5583815


reference: http://www.404festival.com/eng/agosto09.htm

NEW SKETCHES

Mind Map and Sketches

Proposal and Concept Idea 2

Theme of focus: Fear of losing someone in life

Objective:

To create an interactive installation project that expresses the fear of losing someone in life.

To allow people to experience the fear of losing someone and will appreciate everyone in life more after that.

To create an installation project that raises the urge of loving everyone in life and not having regret of losing someone in the future.

 Target Audience:

Group of people at the age of 18- 25. (Young adults) – They are more active and adventurous, outgoing, live out their live to the maximum.

Issue:

People at the age of 18-25 are very active in life. This group of people will go all out to experience things that they are curious about and yet without thinking twice of the consequences that they will face for every action they make. Hence, creating an installation that urge them about how important it is to love people in their life when they are still alive will encourage them and achieve the objective of this installation. This may also promote the act of love in the society and being careful and care for each other in life, not doing something that is careless and cause regretful mistakes to people. It is also something that could educate people about how important it is to have a loving society.

User task:

User enter the room with three walls and sit on a chair, facing a wall that has a camera that capture the image of the user, and eventually will play sound of an serious accident happening and causing death. When user faces another side of the wall, another camera will capture the image and play an incident of someone being killed by robberies or what not. And same thing goes to another wall of the room. Dim lights will shine and blink on and off, flashing to give the kind of fear and scary experience to user.

Description:

This installation is a room with three walls that has three speakers and hidden camera with lights all over the room that will responds to which wall the user faces. This is to allow user to experience different kind of fear and sadness in life when someone leave them in reality. It is to create the sense of fear in user to allow them to think of their love ones happen to be in that situation that the sound played so that they could know how important it is to love the people around them and appreciate them. It is a room that is full of darkness in life and true life experiences that is being expressed and experienced through lighting and sounds.

Proposal and Concept Idea 1

Theme of focus: Curiosity

Objective:

To create an interactive installation project that expresses the act of curiosity in human.

To encourage people to experience the unique culture in language that is in MMU.

To create an installation project that raise the curiosity level of a person in knowing the language culture in MMU.

Target Audience:

Group of people at the age of 18- 25. (Young adults) – They are more active and adventurous, outgoing, live out their live to the maximum.

Issue:

People at the age of 18-25 are very active in life. They are daring enough to go and experience things that they are interested with or curious about. Hence, creating an installation that raise the curiosity level in knowing the language culture in MMU will be something fresh and new that would easily allow people to see the uniqueness of this university. Choosing the culture in language as a topic to discuss is much interesting as language is what we use every day, regardless of our nationality. Here in MMU, we have multi-racial people who speak different languages. Hence, in order to know how unique MMU is as compared to other university, this would easily be the first and effective choice of focus as it is how it shapes the learning culture in MMU as well. Through this installation, people are able to know what kinds of student are there in MMU and their background, by listening to the language they speak. Beside, this may also allow people to have a rough idea of their background and beliefs.  With this, MMU is being promoted and advertised to the people out there.

User task:

User walk up the stairs  as usual but this time, as user steps on the steps, there will by sound playing- sound of human speaking. Each step will play different sound by different people speaking in different language of saying “Welcome to Multimedia University”. And there will be lights at the side of each step that will be blinking as the sound play according to what the speaker said.

Description:

This installation is a staircase that when user steps on the steps, there will be sound of human speaking in a certain language played and lights blinking at the side as the sound plays. This is to indicate that as if the sound comes out from the light as the light responds to user stepping on the step. It creates a certain sense of curiosity in user to know what will it be to the next step and all and eventually, it allows user to walk up the stairs instead of using the lift of the building. It also expresses a warm welcome invitation to user as user walk up the stairs because of the sound they heard from the installation.

Sketches