Digital Bell Tower is an audio installation that reads twitter data to sense the city of Toronto. It’s physical object is a papel marche-ish bell with a compartment to hold an arduino. A Python script searches twitter for the “:)” and “:(” emoticons to check if the city is currently happy or sad. The script then sends an OSC message to Max/MSP.
Max/MSP is used to generate the sounds and its code can be seen on the image above. The bell Arduino sends accelerometer data to the program that parses it and determines the XY position of the bell. That position is then used as in a vector synthesis: morphing between 4 bell samples. The happy and sad twitter information is used to determine how the program playbacks the samples. Happy plays the normal samples and sad plays them in a granular way that gives it a darker sound.
A second Arduino uses a distance sensor to trigger a light every time the bell moves on top of it.
Code (Python)
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Max/MSP is used to generate the sounds and its code can be seen on the image above. The bell Arduino sends accelerometer data to the program that parses it and determines the XY position of the bell. That position is then used as in a vector synthesis: morphing between 4 bell samples. The happy and sad twitter information is used to determine how the program playbacks the samples. Happy plays the normal samples and sad plays them in a granular way that gives it a darker sound.
A second Arduino uses a distance sensor to trigger a light every time the bell moves on top of it.
Code (Python)
Read More
