| Mike.McCrea.400.Project.Update.SPR.07 | |
You Fully Understand... 4.6.7 From A... The apparent disconnect between what logically or rationally should be and what actually is or what is experienced is an elusive but compelling idea for me. Caught amidst a system of ever-increasing knowledge, empirical observations and theoretical ideas, we find little time to consider the origins of "rational thought", both within ourselves and in the "rational community", that is supposed to underlie all motivations for progress so as to propel us and our society in the right direction. As a consequence of this ceaseless move forward, tacit understanding of the world happens, paradoxically, without us knowing of it. Often in a moment of pause, I find myself confounded by what has come to be, often conflicting with what reason or my senses tell me should be. In tracing any given reality to it's seemingly logical or rational origins I find that my confidence in world views inherited from a web of influence that has delivered me to my present knowledge falters. This is especially true in light of technology that offers increasingly disembodied forms of influence which we both cast and become subject to, so we should further question the validity of knowledge acquired through such means. To B.... Such systematic doubt is traced back to the father of modern philosophy, Descartes, but has been recontextualized by the modern philosopher Alphonso Lingis. In his work The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common (1994), Lingis expounds a view of conceptual thought as a confluence of sensory impressions and patterns, forces and resistances we manipulate, looks, vocalizations and gestures of others that are necessarily ordered into coherent conceptual terms: "Thought represents the looks, voices, and gestures of others about the thinker with economic, juridic, and political rules of the social order." As soon as thought arises, it is subject to an imperative: it must reason rightly. This is not, Lingis contends, a free initiative. Thought finds itself commanded to think...commanded to be in command. The text is here. By downloading this, you acknowledge that you are committing copyright infringement in the name of free knowledge and you're ok with that. Yeah free knowledge! Apologies for the poor scan quality. The Project Informed by Lingis' revealing evaluation of the imperative of thought, and my frequent experience of interrogating conclusions reached in the past that have guided me to the present, You Fully Understand... plays with the impossibility of rationally evaluating the immense multiplicity of thought that we nevertheless must experience and use to deliberate on. In a interactive, hapctic 3-D sound installation, a listener will be presented with an apparent means of organizing the sensory input into a coherent experience: the Phantom Omni Haptic controller. Manipulating acoustic principles of periodic sounds as well as traces of spoken words relating to the philosophy above in direct or distant ways, the listener will be immersed in a temporally ordered soundscape which falls in and out of chaos according to their maneuvers. The system itself has a trajectory which is pre-composed for a more "coherent" experience of the sound objects. However, the experience is highly variable for each user according to the manner in which they proceed through the space that is mapped from that of the haptic controller to the ambisonic sound sphere. Listeners will have to resist or give way to forces imposed by the device with a constantly changing relation to the order of the sonic environment. The experiential outcome, will be a confluence of forces, both cognitive and physical, and passing moments won't ever be recovered but through the lens of conscious reflection or future deliberations that are necessarily colored by subsequent experiences. 4.12.7 Code! The SuperCollider code can be viewed here. The C++ code is here. Maaaaaaaad props to Pete Moss for laying the foundations for this interface...couldn't have done it without you! There has also been much progress in learning real-time sound processing, thanks to Josh Parmenter and the UW Dance department. I'll never get that sleep back again, but I love you for it. But there is MORE to be done! ---Review ambisonic theory! This will largely determine the constraints that must be applied to the content for effective spatialization. Refer to papers written by Gary Kendall. What a guy. ---Look into signal processing techniques of convolution and real-time routable signal filtering and delay. |
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