Soundscapes

February 2009

Soundscapes is a one week exercise that explores a different way to mix sounds and play them together to create different combinations of soundscapes.

The project was part of a three weeks sound workshop but this prototype was built within a week. It uses reacTIVision and processing to read the tags placed in front of a webcam.

Creating different sound moods

Different tags were glued to foam core cards. Each of them had a unique fiducial tag that is recognized by the camera and triggers a specific sound.

I put together 25 different sounds: happyness, the sound of the ocean, people, rain, waves, wind... and the combinations possible create a wide variety of soundscapes: a rainy day with some kids playing around, windy afternoon at the beach... The combinations are endless.

The setup

To test it I built a stand to support the camera pointing to the table and the sounds are played by adding tags to the area covered by it.

The processing sketch also displays the position and angle of the tags and shows them as black squares on the screen of the computer.

This video shows how does it work. The reacTIVision vision engine that tracks the fiducial tags can be downloaded from the reacTIVision project page and Processing sketch uses the Minim audio library.