“scoreLight” and “scoreBots” are two experimental platforms for performative sound design and manipulation. Both are essentially synesthetic interfaces – synesthetic musical instruments – capable of translating free-hand drawings into a sonic language of beats and pitches, all in real time. While scoreLight uses a modified “smart” laser scanner to track the figure’s relevant features (in particular contours), scoreBots rely on one or more tiny line-follower robots to do the same. We present here some of our latest experimentations in an informal way.
While scoreLight uses a modified “smart” laser scanner to track the figure’s relevant features (in particular contours), scoreBots rely on one or more tiny line-following robots to do the same.
Interacting with scoreLight is extremely intuitive because we found that people naturally attribute agency to the laser spot (or blob). Interaction becomes then a personal dialogue with a moody luminous “creature”. Indeed, people’s attention seems to focus solely on this ghostly entity, disregarding the rest of the machinery and they interact with a robot made of pure light. With this observation in mind, we recently began developing “scoreBots”, as an interesting tangible instantiation of the scoreLight principle. A scoreBot is a physical, untethered “pick-up head” (in the form of a tiny linefollower robot), that can be grasped and repositioned anywhere in the drawing/score at any time. We are currently developing two versions, one precisely copying the sound production rules used in scoreLight (with the difference that the sound is produced by the robot itself, and becomes therefore spatialized by construction). We are also working on a version in which the line-following robot triggers sound when it passes near a “sound puck” (an object with its own speaker, or capable of sending a wireless signal to a computer).
Each puck can be placed anywhere along the trajectory of the robot; the puck’s sensing range (triggered by the magnetic field of the robot), the sampled sound, as well as the effect robot proximity has on the playback is fully programmable, though it can be useful to have a pre-defined set of effects when performing (not dissimilar to the Reactable setup).