Student Projects 2014 spring

Meditate

Ava Grayson

The purpose of my project is predominantly an opportunity to experiment with biosignal-related sound art as a thesis prototype. My thesis will be dealing with controlling a sonic environment through meditation. The biosignal input for this particular project is via a MindWave EEG headset and a Pulse Sensor. I have been working building the patch with MAX/MSP, as well as Arduino in order to connect the MindWave and Pulse Sensor with MAX.

Finger drums

Can Uzer

The idea comes from my childhood, the years I was playing finger drums on class desks during boring hours. The same musical expression applies when people hear a familiar song in a cafe or a pub, and when they start to tap on their knees, listening to the car radio. Finally it shows itself when trying to write a beat for a new song at the studio ­it all starts tapping to a hard surface with your fingers. So my first aim was to make a seemingly universal instrument which anyone with a hand or two can play.

Secondly, I wanted to design such a system that anyone can build using simple instructions and a humble budget. Therefore, I decided to use a piezo microphone, which consists of fairly cheap pieces and simple to do­it­yourself. I also decided to use only one microphone and compensate sophistication on software side. The software would be Pure Data for it is open­source. An optional third function was installation of the software to a Raspberry Pi, so the whole system would be portable and compact.

Cubes

Cristopher Andersen

When thinking of a physical interaction design object it was very important to me that the physical experience was present.This means that I wanted to work with an analog and physical input that would initiate the output.
Then I came up with the idea of working with sound since I saw a potential in making the auditory experience tangible. I wanted to design an object that facilitat- ed a tactile interaction with the composition of music pieces.

This made me think of the completely digital world of composing music. This is often done in a program that works with a timeline, as with other editing programs and on that timeline different soundbits are added. These sound bits reminded me of little bricks. Which then made me think of childrens interaction with lego bricks, a proces of learning through playing.

As such the idea for the physical aspect was developed, and my target group was found. To this prototype I developed a cube with three different colors having two sides each. Each color represented some kind of melody or beat. When pointing a color towards the webcam the beat would play. A composition could then be created when more than one cube was placed in front of the camera.

Magic Power

Issei Isikura

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C. Clarke

Drum Machine

Janne Rapo

Unnamed

Kristian Pernilä

A Leap Motion controlled visual piece created by PureData Gem. The user can, by moving his or her hand, control the colors and visuals on the screen. A second hand adds brightness and blinking to the colors. The software is completely done in PureData with using the Gem library addition. A Leap Motion controller and a Mac are the hardware components.

Texture Pads

Juuso Patrikainen

Texture Pads is an audio-visual instrument for Leap Motion created with PureData and Processing. User can interact with six different surfaces each producing different sounds, realistic and unrealistic. The soundscapes are based on granular synthesis controlled with the position of one hand and distance of recognized fingers to the center of an active pad.

Light Cube

Karoline Kwon

Inspired by the types of interactions possible with tangible interfaces, I want to create an experience using RGB lights to control a small cube. I used the different sides of the cube to control different RGB settings of the lights inside. The essence of the project is creating a tangible interface to personalize your own colourful light source.

Physarum Polycephalum

Mona Taponen

The plan is to control the behaviour (electrical activity) of physarum polycephalum (slime mold) with EEG and led lights and to render sounds from this behaviour. Physarum naturally tries to move away from light. If the electrical activity change is fast enough and differs from the “basic” electrical activity, this change will be mapped to sounds like this:

Control Your World

Niklas Pöllönen

The idea was to make a light follow the viewer with webcam based motion­tracking. When the viewer approaches the light, the direction of the light changes to a MIDI controller standing next to the light. This way you can use the motion tracking as a guide, to make the viewer interested in the light and then guide the viewer to the controls.

The visuals were to be coded with GLSL. The idea for them was to take a 3D sphere with a earth texture, use displacement mapping on the earth, then change the color/picture of the displaced parts.

Unnamed

Polona & Dejan

The Story Box: Woyzeck

Sae-On Im

Interactive story box based on stage play written by Georg Büchner. In his play, Büchner leads the story through segmented shorts scenes. Although it remains incomplete at Büchner’s death, later it is finished by various authors, editors and translators. Woyzeck shows how unfinished story makes people to imagine and play with story itself.
Interactive storytelling is quite similar to story box that is played by children. Each element in the storytelling can be changed or moved or replaced by user, and through this process users starts to discover or create story. Interactive story box will try to follow principles of story box. By changing or interacting with elements in the box, users will discover the story, or sometimes they can make the story of their own. Each interaction will give users some of hint what is going on or where they are by sound or light.

Paired Distance Alerting Devices

Taro Morimoto

Parents in a public places can sometimes loose track of their children and realize it only 5 minutes after the kid is already far away. To help parents, I want to make small wearable devices that can be paired with each other to for links and to alarm when they loose connection.