Listening Stars

Curatorial Statement

The prevalence of artificial lights has made stars look dimmer. Our project aims to explore the relationship between humans and nature by investigating light pollution. The slowly revolving night sky on the ceiling gives people a childhood sensation of staring at the wondrous universe, while the city scenery depicts our real life. The two projections take sound input from the surroundings: the higher the volume of ambient noises, the brighter the building lights and the dimmer the stars. When someone produces a loud noise, a star disappears and, in exchange, a light comes up. This trade-off between stars and lights is inevitable, and we have to find the balance to live harmonically with Mother Nature.

Product

We have created an interactive night scene with Processing and Photoshop, in which stars are hanging high above in the sky and light is beaming through the windows of consecutive blocks. Stars, in the form of circles, stand for the nature while light, in the form of rectangles, stand for city. The sky is projected onto the ceiling and the city onto the wall. If people make loud noises, an act indicating human activities, the stars would explode and the sky gets dimmer. On the contrary, an increase in the volume of ambient noises people make would trigger more light to appear on the blocks and make the city brighter. We endeavor to showcase the negative influence on nature by human through this interaction between sounds and visual elements.

Intention

The relationship between human and nature has long been an attentive issue. It is, however, incontrovertible that the gradual expansion of population and development of human activities like technological advancement, infrastructure construction, etc has created a negative impact on nature. Pollution, for instance, is the most observable consequence of the impact. Taking the ideas in Recharge: Tree of Life further, We have decided to describe the phenomenal relationship between human and nature through a combined effect of visuals and audios. The stars and light would vary in brightness as a response to the noise people make. We want to create a chance for the viewers to take a proactive role in the work so that they will reflect on their individual influence on nature. It is a reminder to tell them that everybody is responsible for causing changes or damages in the environment no matter to what extent. As our work is based on Rhythm Visualized, we are also trying to push forward the connection between sounds and visual elements. We want to show that sound could not only be visualized and transformed into some vibrant patterns, but also be used to resonant with significant themes along with visuals. We also took aesthetic inspiration from Stardust to make the night sky projection. 

Context

After we came up with the idea of exploring the human-nature relationship through interrogating light pollution, we thought about having a projection of cosmos. One precedent that stands out is Osmo, an inflated sphere in which people living in big cities can fully experience the night sky. Cosmos by Leo Villareal, an homage to Carl Sagan, has a screen on top of viewer's head that simulates the universe with particle effects. The two are most directly related with our project in both form and content. 

We thought about tying the projection with audio input as we came across several examples during our research. Celestia is a game where the user uses his/her voice to produce 3 pitches to control the height of the avatar, which is a star. Murmur is an audiovisual installation where the user murmurs into a tube that sends signal to the visual part, producing a particle explosion. 

Some other sound installation pieces that give us some general inspirations include Not So Still Life. It is a LED light art piece that responds to audience input. When a person claps in front of the piece, the flowers will shrink and then expand out slowly, inspiring us to let our stars respond to loud noises. Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin pulls real-time data from the Internet and projects the words into thousands of small blocks while letting a machine voice reading them out. While it inspires us aesthetically, it also shows us a possible way of gathering real-time user input and the idea of collective contribution, which leads us to use ambient noises as sound input. Bach, The Goldberg Variations illustrates music through the use of geometry.

Process:

To avoid having a cliched theme of human-nature relationship, our first idea was to divide the work up into two sections to show our wish that humans and nature could integrate with each other. In the first stage, the stars would become dim due to an increase in volume of ambient noises or even fall down and become light in the buildings if people clap. In the second stage, the number of stars and lights would increase simultaneously if claps and natural sounds merge to create a beautiful night sky and city scene. However, the complicated configuration is likely to be confusing, so we decided to stick to the primary stage of the human-nature theme. For the idea of turning stars into light was regarded as potentially amusing instead of alarming, we chose to separately exhibit the visual elements at the same time. 

In the implementation stage, we refined our ideas aesthetically and made it doable by using two screens, one for universe and one for city. we decided to change from a static universe to a moving one to make it more lively, so we used a particle system that is constantly emitting stars and rotated the front stars to give an illusion of moving through space. Then, we added in the background made through Photoshop. To make the sky more interesting, we added in the explosion effect of stars. We used FFT to detect surrounding sounds, and if it is past a certain threshold, a star will explode. The whole screen also gets dimmer when the noises are louder. The building part has similar sound detecting effects as the whole screen gets brighter when noises are louder, and if they are past a lower threshold, a light would come up in the center building. To make the aesthetics more unified, we also added a strip of the background into the city scene. 

Collaboration

We cooperated with each other well. We agreed upon selecting Rhythm visualized and Tree of Life to rework on, and we came up with the idea of exploring the human-nature relationship and polished it together. Claire was responsible for the technical component as she is more familiar with Processing and programming. Ray made the sky background through Photoshop and did more polishing and recording of ideas. 

Reflection

Generally speaking, the outcome matches our expectation. The effect was great since there are always people walking around, talking and background music from other projects on. However, there are still many areas to improve on. First, we need to be aware of the surroundings. Although it is nice to have constant background noises, we should've taken that into consideration to adjust the parameters in our program so that city lights are not always on as a result of the music from another video. Then, we should have put the two computers side by side to unify the sound input by taking the projection location into consideration. Also, we could make the detection in FFT Analyzer more precise. Aesthetically speaking, the black area in the background, though an obscure scratch of the buildings, does not make sense. For the next time, we would draw different color blocks to layer the buildings. Beyond improving the technical and artistic aspects of our final project, we’d also like to try something new. Exploring the connection between sound and vision is exciting and we’d like to push the exploration even further to create a project in which people could use their voice to generate distinct patterns or make a change to the original picture like what Not So Still Life does. 

Attribution

Simple particle system example in Processing

https://processing.org/examples/simpleparticlesystem.html

FFT Analyzer reference in Processing

https://processing.org/reference/libraries/sound/FFT.html

Photoshop Tutorial: How to Quickly Create Stars, Planets and Faraway Galaxies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czhJfC1SuU0