Interactive poster generator, using the parameters of the user's voice. Graduation project for my undergraduate study in Sabanci University, Istanbul.
Video Documentation of GigPoster
Brief Description
GigPoster consists of a microphone that records the voice of the user, and a poster generator application which turns the recorded audio into a visual. User murmurs some tunes, whistles, sings to the microphone. The application records the audio and generates a gig poster in real-time.
Objectives & Goals
The aim of the project is to concretize the audio as a visual, and to carry private space into the public space. Through GigPoster; whistles, murmurs and all these kind of personal tunes are exhibited in a public space and gets dignified with a concert poster. In the next section, my conceptual goal will get more clear. Audio visualization is the main technical goal of the project, but its variability from user to user is also the very important part of it.
Conceptual Motivation
People murmur, whistle, sing a chorus they like, beat with their fingers during the flows of their daily lives. These tunes move through the air of their private spaces, and then fly away without taking up any space in any memories. Generally, we don't share these tunes with anyone else, as well no one has a special will to listen them. A person sings loudly when he/she is alone in the kitchen cooking, taking a shower, or in any of his/her private space. These tunes don't get recorded, we even don't remember them.
Brian Longhurst, Professor of Sociology in University of Salford studies the role of music in the daily life. "Users often describe putting their personal stereos on as soon as they leave home with the purpose of 'clearing a space' for themselves." According to Longhurst, personal tunes are being used to create spaces where people feel that they will not be bothered by others. He also argues that through these murmurs, whistles, singings; people don't project themselves, rather construct the world narcissistically as a projection of their own "mediated" sound world. Our murmurs and whistles during the everyday life are highly personal and private.
At this point, let's think of diaries. People keep diaries to record their personal memories. Through Longhurts' views, can't the personal audio be kept recorded visually, like a diary? When we relate the two terms, audio and visual memory; gig posters are the first visuals that come to mind.
Two meanings of "gig" in the dictionary give some clues:
1) any job, esp. one of short or uncertain duration.
2) to work as a musician, esp. in a single engagement.
Gig poster is a product that is directly related with memory. Gig posters increase in variety according to the
artist(s) who gets involved in the event. Very simply, the posters of a classical music concert and a
heavy metal concert are completely different in their visual languages. Overall lay-outs, typefaces and
color scales are the main variables when it comes to poster design for concerts.
Gig is a powerful metaphor for the context of this project. As people take the microphone and
sing in public, they find themselves in a challenge. Through the operation of the project, one's personal tunes become the gig. Thanks to this transition, his/her tunes don't fly away in the flow of everyday life but get embodied with a poster visual.
Scope of the Project
Boundaries of the project are almost apparent, yet convenient to get wider. GigPoster can't be defined as a sonic arts project, as the output is not something auditory. It only includes the decomposing of human voice, so there is nothing to do with musical notations. Besides that, musical acoustic is crucial, as it is directly related with the physics of speech and singing.
This is not a designer tool for any designers. The visual outputs (gig posters) are not the perfect response to the genre of the murmured tunes, they also can't be handled through a consideration of design quality although they are in the correct poster format (visual elements don't overlap etc.).
I worked on GigPoster and prepared it for an exhibition, for getting used in public by the participating users, and ensuring their experiences of the challenge of moving their private spaces to public. Output (the generated poster) is a tribute to the user's private tunes, his/her accepting of challenge. So GigPoster was designed as an Interactive Installation. Since the exhibition, I consider GigPoster as an application.
Working Process
User has 20 seconds for singing, whistling or murmuring to the microphone until the final poster takes shape.
Decibel Degree of user's voice changes the background color.
Fundamental Frequency (treble/bass) of the current voice changes the font.
The Attacks of the Voice changes the background pattern and the images* on poster.
The date and the time of the concert is taken real-time from the date and the time of computer at that moment.
* Images are randomly chosen. Some of them are from real gig posters, some of them are modified/original images from my works, some of them are from other artists' work like David Shrigley.
Thanks
Firat Can Coskun: He is a close friend of mine, who studies Music Composition & Production at HKU (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht). He helped me a lot with sound decomposing and coding (MaxMSP).
Ekmel Ertan: My instructor of the graduation course (VA 402 - Project Studio II) supervised this project.
SCREEN CAPTURES and TECHNICAL BACKGROUND
