Climate Control

Bart Woodstrup, an MFA student at RPI, is currently showing "a series of climate-interactive electronic installations and eco-visualizations intended to address the personal detachment felt towards global climate change." (iEAR Presents)

A "manual" for the installation describes some of the transformations ("data interpretations"): "Power: plant height and rate of growth; Irradiance: sun/cloud/moon animation; Ambient Temperature: leaf color and brightness; Module Temperature: flower head hue and saturation; Timescale: 1:1,800 seconds".

ixi Software

ixi Software presents a number of transcoding-based musical programs. For example, ixi Quarks offers various visual representations of musical events and sound sources.

Tenori-on

The Tenori-On takes advantage of a Monome-like matrix of LED buttons to visualize musical compositions in real-time as they are being improvised. One of the cooler controls is the breakable loop bar, allowing you multiple loop lengths.

Soundmaps

Jan de Weille transcodes the computer screen as audio with her application soundmaps. It offers various modes, two more objective, three subjective, and one unidentified:

1. Kritsj bitmap data is transcoded directly as audio
2. Kratsj bitmap data is transcoded from frequency to time domain, and then directly as audio
3. "MIDI Instrumentalisation using harps and banjos in dodecatonic scale. (6 instruments)", an indirect transcoding
4. "Classic 1 A blues chord progression is imposed to pianos and a bass. (6 instruments)"
5. Classic 2 heptatonic waltz.
6. "Almost nix Does not do too much."

Leonel Cunha has done some excellent explorations into this medium, presenting the visuals and audio simultaneously.

Sound Economy

Stanley Ruiz has constructed a sonification of the Philippines' GDP. The information is interpreted by Stanley and mentally transcoded into (or imagined as) hand gestures, which are then transcoded into midi notes within Max/MSP. These notes are treated as control signals for audio and video output.

Steps to Telepathy

George Dvorsky makes a connection between Chuck Jorgenson's recent work on sub-vocal speech recognition and previous work on cochlear implants: they share input and output forms, but have inverse mapping directions.

Scratching Video and Audio

Hand gestures transcoded as time by Cut Chemist, expanding turntablism into simultaneous video and audio manipulation.

Wiimote DJ/VJing

Daito Manabe and Satoshi Horii have written a patch for transcoding wiimote gestures into visual and audio control signals simultaneously.

William Larson

In the 70s and 80s artist William Larson took advantage of the duality of the fax machine — transmitting images as sound — by transmitting both images and sound in the first electronically mediated collages.

Sound Modulated Light

Sound Modulated Light by Edwin van der Heide transcodes sound (relative air pressure over time) as light (relative brightness over time). A "light receiver" is provided to visitors, allowing them to listen to the light.

4 Performer/Instrument Interaction Models

Joel Chabade has some thoughts on performer/instrument interaction models in the latest SEAMUS newsletter. His classification system goes:

1. Simple: there is a "simple, predictable response" to input (he critiques these models in a NIME 2002 paper)
2. Fly-by-wire: the performer has an abstracted, high-level control of the system
3. Interactive: the instrument acts autonomously, responding to the performer
4. Interacting with life: the performer shares control of the sound with the system, as a sailor shares control of the boat with the waves

The difference between the third and fourth models seems a little unclear, but besides that there are useful distinctions here. "Simple" vaguely corresponds to what I'll call as transcoding, where you interpret one type of data directly as another (gestures as sound parameters). "Fly-by-wire" is a few-to-many transcoding. "Interactive" and "Interacting with life" can be modeled by including a noise source in the transcoding or by adding memory.