Tech
This Robot Remixes The Sounds Of Reality
This piece of robotic art creates music from the sounds it captures around it.
It may look like a xenomorph-blasting plasma cannon circa 2082, but the only thing The Collector aims for is sound. The creation of Moscow media artist and musician ::vtol::, aka Dmitry Morozov, the device is essentially a stereo microphone and two speakers attached to a rotating turret that’s programmed to swivel toward the loudest nearby sound. Once it has collected 100 samples, the machine composes the sounds (while excluding silences and compressing time) into unique compositions, which it then plays back as a one minute loop. Then it erases everything and the whole process starts again.
“The voices, music, city sounds and other random noise are shaped into complex algorithmic compositions, which can be played after it has collected enough of them,” says Morozov. “It is a kind of reality re-mixer—by simply removing the silence and pauses between loud sounds and words, it creates the sense of a very rhythmical and organized aural experience, which sounds very musical to me.”
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