Why?
The combination of Water & Live electronics has interested me throughout my undergraduate studies, and has often resulted in well received & memorable performances, such as the CLOrk performances at the MINT conference 2018 & Festival Internacional De La Imagen 2019.
Throughout my studies I have had the pleasure of studying with Navid Navab & Peter Van Haaften both of whom have worked on Aquaphonia, an installation work which has been incredibly formative to how I work with mappings. I was interested in working with the concepts raised in Aquaphonia of natural, everyday processes controlling electronic processing of sounds captured in the presentation space, but I wanted the interactive interface to be portable, with the ability to be played like a percussion instrument as seen with the fountain used in the CLOrk performances. Having used a piezo inside of a coffee cup for my performance work with the Writer’s Block project, I was inspired to continue on the kitchen theme and decided build an electronically enhanced kettle, which I hope to expand into a family of electronically enhanced kitchen appliances for use in performance or installation environments.
Why these sounds?
The example mappings provided use what I felt was the most musically satisfying results I could muster, without over mapping the sensors and creating musical clutter. The delays & skips provided from Driftmaker are mapped to parse & chop increasing smaller pieces of audio as the temperature increases, accenting the drones created by the heating element at first, then evolving to grab and accent tiny bubbles and transients created by the hydrophone hitting the walls of the kettle as the temperature increases. These are then sent to ++pitchdelay , pitch shifting down the octave to help emphasize the sub frequencies that become more apparent with larger bodies of water and more water turbulence. These are sent into a new bus track, containing another ++pitchdelay shifting up an octave and then sent to a Super Filterbank providing us with a Dorian Comb Filter, where the number of filters is mapped to the temperature value. This creates a brighter timbre, with what I feel is a “magical” quality to it, as the the temperature increases, and creates a more resonant bodied percussion instrument once the water is boiled. Stereo Movement is controlled by a ++binaural filter before the delays, whose’s LFO speed is mapped to humidity saturation. A layer of grain clouds is added via ++bubbler whose density, grain size & grain feedback was mapped to the humidity values of the sensor.
Further synthesis reinforcement was added via a 5 operator sinusoidal hard sync complex made in Max and tuned to match the Filterbank, and used as a carrier signal for a FFT Filterbank controlled by the hydrophone, with the number of partials included in the in final output mapped to the amplitude of the hydrophone. It’s gain in the overall mix is controlled via the Humidity sensor.
What sounds didn't make the cut?
I did experiment with using sensor data passing certain thresholds to trigger the start & stop of sequences on my Moog Mother 32 , as well as triggering sample playback in Izotope Iris 2 via conversion of sensor data to MIDI note & transient extraction from the hydrophone to act as a gate for Note On & Note Off messages, but nothing really satisfied me in terms of a reliable and clear mapping, that could be easily discerned by an audience member with no understand of the mapping. For a performance or installation use case, I see the Kettle as providing more drone & textural details, with enhancement through direct percussive strikes on the kettle’s body.
Some other artistic inspirations worth mentioning
Sound Design inspirations (Mainly for the mappings included in the example reaper project & max patch)
Women With Kitchen Appliances
Barry Truax - Islands
Larum - All the Roads
Ricardo Dal Farra - On Liquid Edge [fragment]