Sound and Music

Untitled Application was a interactive sound work commissioned for Expo Leeds by SAM Digital. The context was the BBC Big Screen which sits in one of Leeds busiest areas, Millennium Square - right in the heart of the Cultural Quarter. The work provided a very public centre piece to the weekend festival.

The work is a two part application. The visual part is written in C++ using openframeworks and opencv. It takes a council CCTV camera as a video feed and performs a series of motion tracking, blob detection functions on the input. Audience movement is used to trigger simple graphic elements on the screen which are superimposed on the camera image. People can generate interactive patterns through their physical movement across the city square.

The second phase of the system is a synthesis engine written in PD (puredata) which communicates via OSC to the C++ application. When a person triggers an animation in a particular area of the screen a message is sent to the synthesis app which plays an apporpriate tone. The notes are selected from three sets of harmonic scales and underpinned by a phased/droning 4 note sitar stye chord. The notes themselves alter pitch and timbre depending on the players behaviour and the generative variables in the synthesis system. Each of the three tonal sets rlates to a specific graphic style in the visuals.

Tom Betts, aka Nullpointer, is developer and performer of projects like Audiopool (a selfsequencing pool of sounds and the representation of those sounds in 2d space), Dividebyzero (a self generating experimental website), FSKN and QQQ (experimental game mods) and Webtracer.  Tom has exhibited his artworks based on games code and technology at physical locations such as The Sonar festival in Barcelona,  Cut and Splice Online, ICA, the NFT London Games/Art conference, and Cybersonica. Recently Tom has also been working with The V&A and Southbank Centre in London.

Visit Tom Betts' website