Interactive Augmented Gamelan

This interactive installation was presented at Hackoustic Festival, Machines Room, London in July 2016. Using instruments central to the Augmented Gamelan ensemble setup, visitors were invited to compose their own sequences to be translated into sound and light.

Everything in the project is driven by Max. The central patch is based on a composition tool called Pipilan, which passes sequences of numbers through a set of rules and rewriting systems. This generates more complex patterns and envelopes for synthesis, with additional control data for lights.

The resulting sounds are played through the "electric bonang" - a set of small gongs with transducers attached, which stimulate resonances through sine waves and short bursts of noise. These signals come back through to the computer through contact microphones for further processing and spatialisation.

Additional gamelan samples are used here to provide texture in lower octaves and clarify the central melodic sequences.