This week we were assigned to read music and tech articles on things that resonate with us, for this, I dived into some of the NIME papers published in 2024. I was skimming through the titles, not sure what to expect(or more specifically, what would stand out for me) until I saw a word that made me stop: Sonification. I am no stranger to sonification, having worked on a final project that used sonification to create sounds from a popular streamer's Twitch chat. Because of this previous interest, I decided to check out the article.
1) Interactive Sonification of 3D Swarmalators
The first paper I came across. A sonification of data coming from a "swarm" of oscillators in virtual space. This space is called the "Swarmalators" and a 3D version of it was used to design an interactive music system. The swarmalators can react and respond to a swarmalator controlled by a user. I found it interesting that this concept. Currently, it is being further researched for performance purposes. I am not particularly interested in performance but I am interested in interactive systems and in sonnification.
2) Towards an Interactive Model-Based Sonification of Hand Gesture for Dance Performance
Sonifying gestures and dances during performances. Reminds me of the body trackers used by Dr. Kite in her performance last semester. It can be used to gain feedback from dance practitioners, I think a project like this could pair well with the previous one. Instead of a user-controlled swarmalator a user's gestures and movements could be the data that a swarmalator system could react and be trained on.
3) SOIL CHOIR v.1.3 - soil moisture sonification installation
Soil moisture to sound. I'm not sure how much more I need to see about how cool and funny this is. This doesn't really relate to the other projects for me, however, it shows that almost anything can be turned into data for sonification. Which does make me think about what "weird" things I can take data from. One thing it makes me think about is if I can get sonification data from a virtual pet, however, i feel there wouldn't be a lot of data coming in.