I did some bird photography for my MultiBird Space project

The MultiBird Space installation is well on the way. I’ve got all the equipment I need now, and my theorethical thesis is halfway finished as-well. I have begun to build the different parts that will make up the whole thing in the end.

Software-wise, the basic idea is I want to translate your position in space into the interactive feedback of the sound of birds. I’ll do that through the use of different Max MSP objects that I’m creating. I call them videoProc, birdLife, sound_# and mixer.

This weekend I created and tested the sound_# object which is in charge of distributing/panning the sound to all eight speakers I’m using. Panning the audio in space is much harder then I expected because our ears do not hear the change in the amplitude linearly. That is the reason to have a logarithmic (a very good approximation) unit DeciBel as a unit for loudness. And because of that fact, if you pan the audio from one speaker to the other linearly, so that when the sound is in the center, both of the speakers are playing with half power, the perceived amplitude is a bit lower then they’re actually playing. So instead of doing the linear pan you have to do one that would resemble a logarithmical, sinus or a square root curve. I choose to do a sinus one, since it seemed to have yielded the best results in my tests and was also less complex in implementation.

Adjusted amplitude, linear function, percieved loudness:

So I soldered the speakers and the wires, connected them to the amps and the m-audio 6/10 interface, started up the computer and the my Max MSP patch and the birds flew across the corridor for the first time.

A very happy day.

Photo-shoot for a German-Danish fashion and textile designer Anna Katharina Thomsen last week.