W I N D C H I M E S ELECTRONICS
is Amanda Eicher and Yasi Perera making things that seem to depend on mass means, with the help of many collaborators, among them Thomas Buckler (web and graphics), Chris Cohen (accounting), Randall Fontes (state) and Walter Funk (waveforms).
ur current product in development is a light harmonizing time house.
It generates a single signal, suitable for both lighting and audio, in resolution of detected/imagined stimuli taken in by its touch and light sensors. It attempts to follow the circadian light-time around it and contribute to the harmony of its local time.
The visualization at left shows the kitten-sized cast-plastic structure, built to hold shoji paper screens. The patterned windows diffuse light from a complex of LEDs and electronic filters designed to behave like moving post-'black body' flame.
The pattern of illumination is, filtered differently, available at an 1/4" audio output, ready to drive an instrument amplifier. The audio is optionally emitted combined with sub-audio control signals, which can be demodulated to use later in the signal path by future modulation-aware signal processors packaged in 'stompbox' format.
The top, snooze bar,
is a silver zigzag - capacitive touch sensor and CdS light sensor
synthesizing touch and light information into a microprocessor-mediated response.
The Light Harmonizer is sensitive to touch-kinds: lightness of touch, timing of approach, and motions across and around. Unfinal attempts at categorical perception. First touches dim the light briefly, then it comes back in viscosity. Regular patterns of touches, it tries to predict and continue. ALSO 'day' to 'day': say, touches you give at lunch - every lunch - even if not regular per our usual clocks, are taken, speculatively, as regularities. Deviations from your regular lunchtimes, shown back in flushes, noticing what is astral weeks, what is dim weeks, when is the decade of french revolutionary 10 day weeks. In searching, we keep the memory sparse; without many bits, we find salience in action.
Its illumination varies also at frequencies we may hear, so at the audio output, fingers thump: bass drums, chimes, 100 metronomes' granular synthesis: embers, wind-through-trees, -through-chimes. We establish a circular heieracrchy of sound types: percussion, arrayed algorithmically, then stochastically, until, being noise, they form the elements of other drum sound syntheses. This carries on early work in computer music by Paul Berg, Herbert Brün, Arun Chandra, Rich Gold, S. R. Holtzman, G. M. Koenig, and Iannis Xenakis, among others, exploring sound manipulation at the machine instruction level as compositional. A physical platform for the exploration of seminumerical algorithms (Knuth's term) in relation to experience- both the experiences of music, and lived time. We take 'seminumerical' to pertain to aspects of postulation beyond Knuth's computer-scientific notion of 'hardware', into pertinence of form. Peter Naur displays this connection in examining problems, tools, and people as mutually constitutive.
We hope to take time as a place to display and collect user interface, generating informational 'persistence' in time itelf as a basis upon which to 'communicate'. "Persistence in time" implies an expanded notion of rhythm, as qualia, consistent with classical concepts.