About This Project
The NOISA project aims to provide an intelligent system that acts to maintain and deepen the performer’s engagement by tracking and learning from the performer’s actions while playing NOISA instruments. It monitors the internal states of a performer ( e.g. motivation, affective states and reactiveness) and acts to maintain these states; if the performer loses individual motivation or interest, the system reacts by changing its physical control-behaviour of the interface in order to make the interaction interesting again.
“NOISA Etude #2” is the second set of performance instructions created to showcase compelling, evolving and complex soundscapes only possible when operating the NOISA instruments, integrating the system’s response as part of a musical piece. The multi-layered sound interaction design is based on radical transformations of acoustic instruments performing works from the classical music repertoire. This second “Etude” is based entirely on interaction with spectrum-complementary Phase Vocoders.
The system is fed with variations of a fixed musical motif, encouraging the system to recognize elements of the motive and create its own set of different versions emulating a human musical compositional process. Also, the Myo Armband is used in a creative way as an independent element for dynamic control, using raw data extracted from the muscles’ tension. This piece is accompanied by a performance score with detailed instructions regarding the performer actions, pauses for system reaction, and different course routes depending on the system’s response.
NOISA was a project developed by the Sound and Physical Interaction Research Group of the Media Lab Helsinki, Aalto University.