Dag Y.

01 · Bio-sonification

Sonic Plants

An interactive, multi-sensory audio installation built around bio-sonification: translating the hidden processes of nature into something people can hear.

Sensors clipped onto living plants pick up their internal electrical currents, the tiny voltage fluctuations moving through each plant. Those signals are fed into synthesizers and software, so each plant becomes an interactive MIDI instrument. Visitors touch and interact with the plants, and every gesture shapes a unique ambient soundscape.

The piece draws attention to the voltage-based communication inside the plant kingdom, and to how alive nature is.

How it works

Sonic Plants was Dag’s first appearance as a Sound Scene artist, where “visitors could make music using electronic current signals transmitted directly from plants” (Sound Scene). The date comes from Dag’s Instagram post of April 22, 2020 (“Last summer…”).

02 · Sculpture · Light · Sound

Sonic Altar

Dag’s role: he wrote all of the programming and prototyped the software for Sonic Altar.

Sonic Altar is an interactive animated installation with three distinct sound-emitting pillars. Participant choices shape a dynamic soundscape and provoke visual response. When the Sun is still, when light and darkness hover on the fulcrum of the veil, what becomes visible? We make the continuum visible to the eye and audible to the ear. What will you do with your individual creative agency? Creators Serano, Yeshiwas, and Renfro unite their practices of programming, engineering, 3-d printing, illustrative animation, musicality, and DIY ethos to culminate in a unique sculptural offering. Alrich & Kawashima engage with the sculptures in a moving contribution to demonstrate how we can leverage our positionality in order to create harmony.

Text from the installation placard.

Inside the pillars

Dag’s code is split into three microcontroller programs: create, abstain and destroy. Each pillar senses a visitor and answers with notes and light.

• Presence → music. A VL53L4CX time-of-flight sensor measures a visitor’s distance. That distance sets the speed of seven-note arpeggios and the brightness of the lights. If someone moves sharply, the current phrase breaks off.
• Notes → light. Each note lights a 17-pixel rainbow segment of a 119-LED NeoPixel strip, so light and sound move in step.
• Synthesis. A VS1053 audio chip works as a General MIDI synthesizer, driven over serial MIDI at 31,250 baud.
• Gesture → stems. In the destroy pillar, an APDS-9960 gesture sensor reads up, down, left and right hand swipes. Each swipe plays one of four MP3 stems from an SD card on the VS1053.
• Light sensing. In the create pillar, an analog light sensor fades the LEDs up when the room gets brighter.
• Effects. Distance also drives an analog control-voltage output labeled “DSP CV OUT”. The repo includes a Max gen~ stereo feedback-delay patch.

Stack

• Arduino C++
• Adafruit Feather
• VL53L4CX ToF
• APDS-9960 gesture
• VS1053 MIDI / MP3
• NeoPixel (119 LEDs)
• SD card
• Max gen~
• Logic Pro (stems)

Technical details come from the project’s private repository. The animation and 3-D printing mentioned on the placard aren’t in the repo, so they aren’t described here.