This was a project dreamed up and created by Christian Petersen and myself that was shown in Ghost Gallery in Capitol Hill Seattle for most of July 2011. It was part of the Action! Part 2 show.
Although at first the program running the animation started simple, it ended up being fairly complex. The animation shown is reactive to sound and especially reactive to the sound of the triangle shown in the video. We wanted this effect to keep a strong tie between the triangle and the interactive program and also to reduce the effect that background noise might have.
In order to achieve this I created what I’m calling a ‘frequency mask’ although it probably has a more common name amongst audio engineers. The sound produced by hitting the triangle is consistent, meaning that although the volume changes over time the frequencies in the sound stay the same for the most part, so I created a software tool to track the frequencies generated over time so that I might be able to pay attention certain parts of the frequency spectrum and not others.
We went through at least four different combinations of microphones and computers trying to get a good match. Good grief! Well worth the effort, if I don’t say so myself.