Projects
NetRooms Visualization
One of the pieces I developed while doing an artist residency at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast was this visualization for Dr. Pedro Rebelo’s networked music piece NetRooms.
View on Vimeo.
Netrooms is a participative network piece that invites performers from around the world to contribute to an extended feedback loop and delay line across the Internet. The work explores the juxtaposition of multiple spaces as the acoustic, the social and the personal environment becomes permanently networked. The performance consists of live manipulation of multiple real-time streams from different locations, which receive a common sound source. Netrooms celebrates the private acoustic environment as defined by the space between one audio input (microphone) and output (loudspeaker). The performance of the piece consists of live mixing a feedback loop with the signals from each stream.
Netrooms is designed to take advantage of the latency inherent in commonly available audio streaming software. The typical delay between musical gesture and articulation at a remote site is approximately six seconds. The visualization for Netrooms takes advantage of this extended delay by sending a secondary data-stream from each site directly to the main performance site containing audio amplitude metadata. Because of the compact nature of this data, and the direct connection to the performance site (i.e. the stream doesn’t need to go through an external server), the audio metadata arrives well before the actual audio that it refers to. The temporal difference between the audio data stream and metadata stream allows for the visualization of the audio coming from each site before it actually is heard. The visualization of each site is laid out in a star-formation with the points of the star representing each remote site, and the centre of the star representing the main performance site. Amplitude data is visualized as a stream of brush-strokes with larger brush strokes representing louder data. Each of these sites visualizations is given a distinct visual representation, and synchronised so that the visualized amplitude data reaches the centre of the visualization at the same time as the audio is heard in the performance space.
