Audio pipe forest
Paul and I, with the help of others have been working up some ideas for a multi-channel audio recording piece.
Pipes would hang down from the ceiling which you can both listen to and speak into. Each different pipe would carry a different channel or game.
Many of the recordings you would expect to hear when you interacted with it are from previous visitors talking into one of the pipes. There are likely to be a lot of simultaneous channels running at one time.
Part of the joy of this piece is the spectacle we imagine if a few people are interacting with the pipes at one time, each being asked to search for a different colour pipe, shout a different thing.
There is also a nice temporal disjunction here, with people unknowingly engaging in a dialogue with someone else in the exhibit who could be there right now, or who could have been there last week.
Comments
martinsan on 12 September 2005
Upon investigation, driving tubes seems to be relatively straight-forward, and something like a Behringer HA8000 would provide 8 channels of stereo audio (or 16 mono channels with some crosstalk / breakthrough) for about £85. Storing and delaying audio could be via a Roland Boss guitar tape-loop emulator pedal (about £250 per channel) or via a PC with an audio interface (about £250 for the interface, plus microphone amplifiers, plus software…)
cefn on 30 December 2005
Been examining ways of getting the numbers of simultaneous channels we want.
I’ve used a plantronics headset with external USB audio card (providing stereo output and mono microphone input) for a while for my skype and iChat.
At less than $10 each, these seem like a cheap alternative to increase the numbers of sound channels, are compatible with an intel or mac platform, and can be multiplexed through usb hubs with as much expansion as you like.
Many are running at USB 1.1 speeds so shouldn’t be a problem to multiplex indefinitely with USB 2.0 equipment if I understand the technology correctly.