makerfaire.com:

Maker Faire Bay Area 2009
The Maker Fair Organ

Location: Outside Front of Fiesta

I take the sounds of the Maker Fair and turn them into a playable instrument: the Maker Fair Organ. Here's how it works: * Start with the basic principle of a brass or woodwind instrument: a chaotic sound source is filtered by passing it through a long tube which amplifies frequencies related to the resonant frequency of the tube. * Now reverse that: place a tuned tube in a noisy environment with a microphone at the closed end of the tube. The sounds that relate to the resonant frequency of the tube are picked up by the microphone. Other sounds are filtered out. * The Organ is then a set of tuned tubes placed together in a row. Each tube "hears" the portion of the sonic melee that is the Maker Fair that matches its tuning. * Hook a keyboard up to the tubes to turn on and off each tube's microphone, so when you press the C key, the microphone for the C tube is turned on, and when you release it, that microphone is turned off. * Now you have a playable instrument. Feed the sound from the microphones that are on to an amplifier and speakers. The tubes hear the sounds from the amp, and further amplify them in a tuned feedback loop that grows into an organ-like sound. * The instrument will be played in 4 modes: - interactive: Anybody can sit down at the keyboard and start playing a tune with the sounds of Maker Fair! - canned music: The instrument will be played by sending midi files to the controller, thus playing familiar tunes. - performance: small performances with other musicians can be planned or impromptu. Perhaps clowns or juggler will drop by. - generative music: A more ambitious plan will be to write a generative music algorithm that listens to the ambient sounds, detects notes, and composes a musical soundscape that is then played using those same sounds. This is a similar concept to my piece from 2 years ago, Haunted Garden. An added twist will be to take the parameters to the music generation algorithm, think of them as a genome, with a mutation function, and run artificial evolution on the composition. The fitness function would be the listeners preferences: there will be big "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons that rate the results of mutating the genomes. Sets of parameters that make music that pleases the makers get to breed and send their genes to the next generation, thus evolving the musical landscape.

Web site: http://www.art.net/simran/GenerativeMusic/MakerOrganProposal.html

About the Maker(s)

Simran Gleason Simran Gleason is a sound artist who works in interactive installations, generative music, and composition. He likes to make algorithms that make music based on some aspect of the real world.