SONIC TAI CHI was exhibited at the Powerhouse Museum from November 2005 - January 2006. 500 Harris Street, Ultimo, Sydney. www.powerhousemuseum.com

SONIC TAI CHI

Sonic Tai Chi is an interactive soundlab for exploring the relationship between environmental intelligence and human interaction.

Spaces that intelligently respond to our actions are increasingly part of our work, play and learning environments. However the use of sound for both interfacing and specifying these environments is still in stages of early exploration.

The Sonic Tai Chi soundspace is not simply an interactive installation - rather it is a lab for developing the foundations for intelligent interactive environments whereby sound is used not as an ambient measure or indication of human interaction or environmental intelligence, but actively employed as a spatio-temporal medium for designing space and spatial experience using gestures.  

It uses a computer vision system to capture movement data to produce a visualization comprised of the interpolated real image of the user combined with random Cellular Automata. The sound is a sonification of the motion left to right and up and down with pitch, spatial panning, timbre and intensity affected by user interaction. A second sonification engine produces audio particles from the position, multiplicity and intensity of the Cellular Automata that can be triggered into rapid proliferation (using the generative breeding metaphor of aLife) by moving the body in one horizontal direction across the room, and towards stasis by moving in the opposite direction. This work is designed for spatial interaction by the general public. It is installed in an approximately 25m-square room with a rear projection screen, stereo speakers hidden in the ceiling and camera concealed below the screen. The processing system developed in MaxMSP and Jitter uses the Horn-Schunk method to estimate optical flow of movement in captured using a simple Internet conference camera. Gloves or markers are not necessary to capture accurate gestural interaction in space. 

An early version of Sonic Tai Chi was exhibited at Sydney Esquisse 2005.