Maybe you’d like to contribute or purchase advanced tickets via the project’s indiegogo page. Also, give the actual piece a listen!
Author: doug
Social Interaction
Maybe you’d like to contribute to the project’s indiegogo page. Also, give the actual piece a listen!
mutability and unchangeableness
The moonlight gave a poetical indefiniteness to the distant parts of the waters, and while the rapids were glancing in her beams, the river below the falls was black as night, save where the reflection of the sky gave it the appearance of a shield of blued steel. No gaping tourists loitered, eyeing with their glasses, or sketching on cards the hoary locks of the ancient river god. All tended to harmonize with the natural grandeur of the scene. I gazed long. I saw how here mutability and unchangeableness were united.
– Sarah Margaret Fuller in Summer On the Lakes, in 1843
Summer on the Lakes is a really good dive into life in America in 1843. As a primary text, it’s really great at expressing what must have been the unique thrill of discovering parts of America. It’s not without faults – there’s a lot of noble savage imagery that’s had to stomach. It’s worth skipping through that to digest beautiful moments like the passage above. Her ability to capture nature through words is really enjoyable.
She had some pretty cool relatives, too.
Maybe you’d like to contribute to the project’s indiegogo page. Also, give the actual piece a listen!
Coming soon
How the project works
I’ve had a few people ask me how the project has been put together, so here’s a little bit about how the sausage is made:
Two pieces of hardware run the project. The first is an Ambient Weather weather station that is installed outside of the Museum of Human Achievement. This is wirelessly sending data to a little hub plugged into MoHA’s Internet connection. Ambient Weather hosts the data on their servers. It’s actually a great product, and I was thrilled with how easy it was to install. Highly recommended if you’re interested in setting up a personal weather station.
On the other end is a Raspberry Pi, which is doing three things. The first is that it’s gathering the weather data from the Ambient Weather server using a python script. It grabs the data in five minute intervals in order to not overtax their servers or the Pi.
The next thing that the Pi does is load the data from a text file into SuperCollider, a music programming language. The code in SuperCollider has a number of scheduled tasks to analyze the data and perform specific actions based on the weather. The resulting music reacts to a number of atmospheric conditions, including the temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind angle, wind speed, barometric pressure, UV, and solar radiation. I am also pulling data from AQICN.org, which has accurate air quality information. All of these characteristics are incorporated into a number of different aspects of the music. If you want more detail, just ask!
As the Pi is making the music, it is being sent to a program called icecast, a tool to broadcast sound in real time online. This is what delivers the audio to your speakers when you click play on the stream.
For what its worth, setting up icecast was by far the trickiest thing to make work. If you’re planning to try out a similar project, I can offer you some guides on how to make this work. Its much to boring and technical to really get into here.
If any of that was unclear, you can also look at this graphic I made.
You made it all the way down here? Maybe you’d like to contribute to the project’s indiegogo page. Also, give the actual piece a listen!