Summer Bugs

installation by Rural Noise Ensemble

Summer Bugs was performed in a cow pasture in rural Woodbury VT.

This instantiation of the Rural Noise Ensemble was myself, Sean Clute, and Otto Mueller.

Description of the system used during performance: Two dimmable LED panels are placed on tall tripods, some distance apart from each other, with a microphone and camera trained on each.  A human participant beats a lightweight paddle modeled on the wing of a fly. The panels respond to analyses of both the insect activity on the panels and the frequency of the human participant’s wing beats in relationship to a target frequency, and adjusts the relative brightness of the two panels. The human participant attempts to keep both panels equally bright by adjusting the speed of their movements. Audio from all microphones is mixed and processed for a virtual audience, and is inaudible to both human and insect participants in the system."

I built all the hardware, networking, and computer vision infrastructure, and wrote the software to translate and send information about the system state via OSC to a Max patch (written by Sean) that generated the sounds. Otto wrote the paper, arranged use of the field, and demonstrated unshakeable wing flapping technique for close to a full hour. =8)

Sean made a video, which was accepted into the NIME Shanghai 2021 conference for exhibition:

The full official project description is here.