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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Eric Heep
Eric Heep is a creative technologist and sound artist living in Val Verde, CA, and is pursuing his MFA in Music Technology at the California Institute of the Arts. Eric has produced works as a composer, as a sound artist, and as a creative coder. Currently, Eric is researching sonification, information retrieval, machine learning, as well as the methods in which one can incorporate such fields into a working art practice.
Daniel Clark
Danny Clarke is a composer who currently lives in Valencia, California. He spends most of his time worrying about the way that technology and compositional method can simultaneously remove an audience from an experience and present that audience with information about that experience that was previously hidden. It is likely that some of his work reflects this navel bent.