Cellular Audio

October 5th, 2004 6:28 PM

Collisions of Eno with recent discussions with Mike and Matt. New idea: audio installation with a grid of speakers on ceiling/floor, each speaker having a subtly different audio track to play. Speaker volume is controlled by cellular automata. What would a Life glider sound like? Or some of the old demo-scene plasma effects? You could even extend this into more dimensions and have light/video projection on a third axis. Since Life is Turing complete, what would simple programs sound like in an installation like this? How far could you push this?

Comments

umm… since regular music isn’t recorded this way, it’d be left to say, purely synthesized sounds. more a novelty than something useful imo.

not to mention humans only really have 2 ears, so all you’re doing is layering waves to make just crazier compounded waves.

of course, it seems like the aural experience is heading that way anyways. We started with mono, then stereo, then the old dolby pro logic, and they just keep adding more and more discrete sound channels. wtf are they up to now? 8.2 or something like that?

Posted by: rich on October 7th, 2004 12:24 AM

Synthesized or recorded. The idea isn’t to be useful per se, but to be an interesting artistic environment. I’m not looking for accurate playback of a static, pre-recorded sound. Rather, I’m looking for ways to experience a layering of sounds that combine in interesting ways based on something seemingly non-deterministic.

Posted by: kasei on October 7th, 2004 5:27 PM