A lot has happened between my last entry and this one…
So, over the winter break (which lasts from roughly a week before Christmas to mid-January at my school), I took a course in Immersive Environments. I was part of a project team that created an environment that was a composite of particles and crystals, whose locations were mapped onto the exhibition space, a 134.6 channel high-density loudspeaker array called The Cube–this one, to be precise–with two semicircular screens about 17″ tall which are collectively referred to as The Cyclorama (the guy in this video was one my my teachers–he’s The Sound Guru and knows the space inside and out). So, we projected the video content onto the Cyclorama while the sounds played throughout the speakers in the Cube, and we used a program called Max to control everything: from the imagery (some of which was modeled in Maya and adapted for stereoscopic 3D and rendered in After Effects) to the sounds, which were spatialized using a patch (essentially a graphical/node-based program that executes the task you’ve assigned it) in Max that allowed us to place them exactly where we wanted, namely where the crystals were, to create the impression that the crystals were resonating bodies that emanated their own sounds while the particle field in which they floated provided a visual and sonic ambient background. My primary job was creating a soundscape that matched up with the ethereal, quasi-magical atmosphere of the person in charge of visual content, and it worked rather well, since the people to whom we presented out project seemed to be impressed, and they liked my sounds (which always makes me squeal with sound-nerd glee).
At the moment, I am continuing my work on various other sound projects, and not doing quite as much with modeling and animation. Most of my coursework and research is semester is also centered on sound, and since the NIME conference is coming to our campus this summer, I will be immersing myself in bleeding-edge sonic research for the foreseeable future, which is a very exciting prospect.
Still taking those baby steps,
Jasmine
