Übeldrohne
Wave Cave – Amber Lepley & Meason Wiley

Übeldrohne is a electro-acoustic instrument that utilizes four bass strings, motors, and slide levers to
create polyphonic bass drones. Combining elements of a traditional electric bass, pedal steel, as well as more unique instruments such as Andrew McPherson’s magnetic resonator piano and Trimpin’s adapted piano “singer” instruments, the übeldrohne was designed to create low frequency swells and timbres, utilizing felt-tip motor heads to simulate a bowing action. Each motor can be independently controlled, as well as the volume of each pickup, by the fader section on the front panel. The strings individual pitches are changed by way of four sliders attached to tracks from inside the instrument. The beautiful apple plywood enclosure was designed, fabricated, and assembled exclusively by the artists.

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Crystal Growth
Walt Disney Modular Theater Lobby – Eric Heep & Daniel Clark

When James Tenney developed his idea of modeling pitch material generation on crystal growth, he noted that, given certain simple settings, his algorithm would generate pitches in a way that mirrored the development of pitch materials over the course of Western musical history. This installation makes Tenney’s formula incarnate using a 27-piezo array to produce a variety of different harmonic “crystals.” Taking the analogy to Western musical history a bit further, the presence of people around the school will cause mutations to occur in the crystal, which produces impurities, but also heightened complexity. This data for mutating the crystal is provided via the CityGram project that is installed throughout the school, which provides a sonic heat map of the area.

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Are We Not Connecting
Walt Disney Modular Theater Lobby – Daniel Watkins

By taking text, one of the more explicit forms of representation, and reducing it to ripples on the surface of water you subvert the vary nature of the medium. This establishes a sort of poetic duality which renders the text all at once finite and futile.

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Or, Aurora
Walt Disney Modular Theater – Jesse Garrison

An interactive exploration into the northern lights, the earth’s magnetic pull, and our changing relationship to nature.

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Flowers
Walt Disney Modular Theater – Dexter Shepherd

A particle system exploring pattern, oscillation, and randomness.
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Artifacts
Walt Disney Modular Theater – Daniel Reyes and Christopher Knollmeyer

Exposing the artifacts in one’s self image through an array of iPhone/iPad cameras. Each successive phone captures its’ neighboring screen, amplifying the distortion of signals until one’s self image becomes indistinguishable; an aliasing selfie.

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Phase 3
Walt Disney Modular Theater – Meason Wiley & Amber Lepley

This is the third piece in a series of sculptures meant to be representative of sound. Phase #3 is a 2' x 15' static wood sculpture depicting sound in the frequency domain. Phase #3 is designed by utilizing an FFT of pre-recorded audio. The various frequencies and magnitudes of the sound are calculated and then translated into distance measurements and represented physically on a flat landscape using rectangular dowels.

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Cycle
Walt Disney Modular Theater – Meason Wiley & Amber Lepley

Mechanical Wave (Cycle) is a kinetic sculpture made up of 16 – 2 ft aluminum tubes suspended from aircraft cable, which are driven by a 10′ x 24″ custom-designed helix drive shaft. When opperated the movement of the tubes generates a sound wave. This is the second installment in a three part installation. See also Phase#3 (MOD), and NODE (Wavecave)

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Node
Wave Cave – Meason Wiley & Amber Lepley

NODE is an immersive interactive real-time installation that focuses on visualizing sound waves through a liquid medium, in this case, water. When sound is passed through a physical excitatory medium such as water, the relationships between minimum and maximum displacement are made visible and complex patterns emerge. This installation utilizes four large white birch plywood cubes set up in a row. Embedded inside each cube is a 10” subwoofer and amplifier. The top section of each cube is surrounded in 1/8” white acrylic which holds 2” of water. Hidden within grooves of the plywood just below the acrylic are rows of white LEDs. Additionally, there are two ultrasonic sensors embedded on the outside of each cube, one on either side. Box #1 contains an Arduino Mega 2560 Micro-controller that handles the sensor data and controls both the LEDs and the amplitude of the sound waves.

When a visitor approaches a cube, the cube activates and will begin generating a low frequency waveform. As the sound fades in, complex fractal patterns start to form in the liquid. The person’s distance from the box dictates the frequency and harmonics of the sound, which, in turn, effects the patterns in the water. If the person gets closer to the box, the sine wave morphs into a more complex waveform and starts to self-modulate. The cubes are all linked together, so if another person stands in front of a different cube, both cubes start modulating each other. This is conceptually linked to the use of “operators” in FM Synthesis. Each cube functions as an operator and can modify another based on how many people are in the space. The more people in the space, the more active and complex the sound and visual patterns. Additional sound comes from 8 custom-made satellite LED/speakers which gives the viewer an audio range interpretation of the low frequency sounds being created by the subwoofers. All of the sounds will be generated using custom-built software.

The purpose of this installation is to show clear relationships between acoustic signals and the visible patterns being created. We typically view sound in very limited ways, primarily with graphing/signal analysis software that is only meant to be “representative”. This piece allows us to view what sound actually looks like and get a sense of the complexity of physical and mathematical relationships that are fundamental in nature.

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