In May the Workgroup 3 of the COST-SID Action will meet for two days at IEM in Graz. We will do a practical session to experiment with the Tracked Hand-held Speaker (THS). Below is the call for ideas, sent out by Gerhard Eckel.
Dear WG3 members,
in the 6th WG3 meeting in York it was decided to include in the next WG3 meeting in Graz (May 11/12) a practical session to experiment with a setup I suggested and will describe in this email (see also the extract from the meeting minutes at the end of this email).
Tracked Hand-held Speaker
The Tracked Hand-held Speaker (THS) is a simple setup proposed by Gerhard Eckel for collective experimentation in the practical session of the 7th SIG-WG3 meeting at IEM in Graz May 11th and 12th 2009. The THS is meant to be used to build and experiment with a number of sonic interactive artefacts particularfor such a setup.
This is a call for ideas on how the setup should be used und which aspects of SID could be illustrated or explored by them. Ideas who’s implementation need preparation should be formulated and communicated as soon as possible so that any development necessary could be realized before the meeting (a description of the technical infrastructure follows).
Goals
Here comes a list of initial goals of this collective experimentation sesseion. Please comment on them and add more if you feel inclined to do so:
- develop sonic interaction designs for a particular setup (the THS)
- produce sonic interactive artefacts as a basis for discussion in SID
- sketch demos for final project presentation
- define what can be understood by sonic interaction design in this
context - compare design strategies / approaches, explore artistic approaches
- experience prepared designs together, give feedback, evaluate designs
- develop criteria for evaluation of designs in this restricted setup
Setup
The THS is a small speaker without an enclosure, which can easily be
held in one hand. Five tracking markers are attached to the speaker
with little rods. The speaker is attached to a power amplifier by a
long thin cable. The tracking markers allow the speaker to be tracked
in 6 degrees of freedom with high spatial (about 1 mm) and temporal
resolution (120 Hz). The tracking is realized with a 15-camera VICON
system in a volume of about 100 m3. Thus you may walk around with the
speaker and explore different spatial regions. As the high resolution
of the system is available in the whole volume, a very refined spatial/
sound/tactile control is possible. Since the speaker is held in the
hand, lower frequencies are also sensed haptically. The tracking data
is made available via OSC in the following format (and at a rate of
120 Hz):
/data Tx Ty Tz Ax Ay Az
- position: Tx, Ty, Tz in carthesian coordinates in mm,
the origin is located on the floor in the center of the room - orientation: Ax, Ay, Az in angle/axis representation
As sound synthesis platforms PD, SC, Max/MSP, or any other OSC-
compliant synthesis app may be used. This could either be run from a
laptop you bring along or from one of our machines (PC with Windows
and Linux or MacPro with OS X) in the lab where we are going to work –
the IEM CUBE:
Additionally to the THS setup, the CUBE is equipped with 24 speakers
in hemispherical setup (Tannoy System 1200), an array of 48 speakers
mounted on the ceiling, controllable in 16 groups/channels (JBL
Control 1), and 2 subwoofers. All 42 channels are accessible via MADI
from a MacPro (running Max/MSP and SC) and a Linux machine (running PD
and the CUBEmixer). Futher details on the CUBEmixer can be found here.
