Tipping Point
During my internship at Strijbos & van Rijswijk i was asked to create and program the sounds for a dance show called Tipping Point from Panama Pictures.
Tipping Point consists of a combination of dancers and acrobats that interact with a large, hardly controllable hemispherical object. The object tips as the performers move on top of it and creates a balancing act. More information here: Panama Pictures – Tipping Point.
I was asked to make the object come to life with sound. In the first few weeks i experimented a lot with the object. Since the object looks (and is) very heavy i wanted to emphasise that. I tried to record the object with different kinds of microphones (piezos, condensers, dyanmic) to see if i could use the sound that it created. Those recordings turned out to be too noisy and did not feel very natural with respect to the object. I then started experimenting with synthesised sounds instead of live recordings. I created a granular synth in Max MSP that uses metal percussion as source and pitches it down very low. This created a bassy sound that suited the heavyness of the object very well. I complemented this sound with 2 extra granular synths with higher pitched metal crackles that resembled the tearing and stress of the metal as it is being put under pressure by the tipping.
I used a gyroscope for tracking the angular velocity of the object. I used the gyroscope from an Ipad and used the app ZIG SIM for sending the sensor data to my Max MSP patch with OSC.
The angular velocity is mapped to different parameters of the granualar synths. The most important one was the mapping of the velocity to the retrigger speed of the granular synths. Furthermore it was mapped to filtering and amplitude.
Since the Max MSP program is used in a live context it had to be robust and stable. Next to that it also had to be understandable for the theater technician since i would not be present at every show. I made sure that it always started in a default preset and needs very minimal configuration.