Sonorama

Sonorama is a work in progress. This project is part of my second Master's degree in New Media Design and Production at Aalto University. The project is currently in development and will be completed in 2023. Showcased below, are some excerpts of the visual component and the network of the project, along with a snippet of the sounds that the system can create.

Sonorama is an exploration in the domains of artificial life, inquiring into profound philosophical questions about existence. This immersive and interactive installation revolves around themes of displacement and destruction of organic life while illuminating the fragility of sonic ecosystems that are often overlooked.

The synthetic living entities inhabiting Sonorama exist in a cycle of life and death. The audience is invited to interact with these creatures through a microphone that serves as the source of nourishment for these organisms. Existence within Sonorama is characterized by the ability to self-create and individualize—a process known as autopoiesis—and the metabolization of sonic energy, all while coexisting in a world that fosters collective creativity. These organisms possess the ability to learn from their environment, and they are free to express any sound they want. They can tell sonic stories interact in ways that might be unrecognizable to us.

The system is composed of several independent parts: the audio pre processor that takes either a stream or the feed from the microphone and transformed it into a spectrogram; the shader processor that creates the species in a 2D world bounded by frequency and time; the neural network that controls the evolution of the creatures and their sonic expression in the 2D image domain; and an audio post-processor that converts the resulting images back into audio. All of it happening in real time.

This project invites contemplation on the profound impact of our technological advancements on the natural world, the inherent uncertainty of free agent systems and AI, as well as prompts us to question the very definitions of what it means to be alive.

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