I’ve been interested lately in the concept of giving abstract things a voice and answering the question of what something would sound like if it made noise. This project aims to create sound from movement.
In a TED talk by Golan Levin, he presented an interactive project that highlighted the negative (or interstitial) spaces of cast shadows. This idea seemed like a natural way to segment a generic image, so I decided to use blobs (uninterrupted regions of an image) as the basis for generating tones. In this processing sketch, the system finds three areas of a particular size and assigns each a tone according to its size associating larger pieces with lower tones. The colors indicate the three sound-generating regions.
The applet has been posted along with the source, although you may have to run it locally in processing to work properly. You will need a video camera attached to your computer. Listen to a sound clip from the synth.
