At the annual electronic music festival Moogfest this year, some of the greatest treats were the array of installations located in the Broadway Outdoor area of the festival. Standing out in the crowd was the Sand Noise Device, an inspired creation that was designed by four students from the Cal State East Bay’s Multimedia Department. Described as an augmented reality and generative synthesizer, the device is a generative musical system of sorts.
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The Brains Behind The Project
The Sand Noise Device or SND was created by James Saxon, Jay Van Dyke, Devin Dominquez and Matt Roads. They are graduate students in the Multimedia Department at Cal State East Bay and are constantly working on projects in the program. The focus of the project was to create something fun that would give people an interactive musical experience.
How It Works
To use the SND, users have to move around tangible, self-illuminating objects around a sandbox. This projects virtual objects into the sand whose positions are detected by an array of sensors to create sound based on their movements. The modular system of the SND runs on a custom built software that makes use of open-source tools like Pure-Data and openFrameworks.
Sound Of Music
The music produced by the SND closely resembles a combination of Eno-esque and Indian-influenced droning sounds, exhibiting evolving electronic textures underneath. Essentially a virtual, interactive installation, the project aims at making the intersection between the projected visuals, audio, and the sandbox itself as seamless as possible.
Augmented reality
Making the projections of the virtual objects to seem as though they are physically present in the sand, SND is driven by the seemingly physical properties of the virtual objects like speed and location that are sonified into properties like pitch and panning.
Future Plans
The team is excited to see the SND become a public space where people can interact with electronic music, but this may be a little far-fetched for now.
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