Vedant Manwadkar

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Vedant Manwadkar

Backbench Orchestra - Interactive Audio Installation

An ensemble of tables that respond to your rhythm, and jam with you - only till the bell rings.

Installation

Experience Design

Interactive Audio

Role:

Concept Design, Build (12 weeks)

Discipline:

New Media Design

Concept Video

Tables that invite you to interact and jam

The tables knock at you

You hear knocks coming from the tables, inviting you to walk over and knock back.

Surface transducers under the table vibrate the tabletop to produce the sound.

You knock, they listen

The table silently listens to the rhythm of your knocking.

Home-made contact microphones pick up the input and send it over to the Control Patch.

The tables play you a rhythm

The table plays you a groove… similar to what you played, only slightly different.

Control System uses the stored pattern of your knocking to play back sounds.

Sometimes, they don't listen…

The table goes off on its own percussive solo, ignoring your knocks

The Control System tells the table to keep playing, and to not receive a pattern

Sometimes, they play together

They go off playing a rehearsed cohesive rhythm, each knowing their part to play.

Control System plays a pre-coded pattern that makes them play their parts in time with each other.

Only until the bell rings.

The tables fall silent when the school bell rings. They no longer listen and respond.

The Control System plays the school bell, which turns the microphones and the audio output off.

1 Control System to Rule Them All!

The Control System is a Pure Data Patch that helps the "Stager" of the experience to have full control over what the tables listen to and how they behave. It does the following functions:

Takes input from each microphone and stores it as a pattern
Triggers sounds for each table
Prompts the tables to knock at the user
Triggers pre-programmed compositions
Adjusts thresholds so that the tables are less/more sensitive to the user's input
Triggers the "school bell" that ends the experience

A Rube Goldberg machine is an intentionally overly complicated contraption designed to perform a very simple task through a long, indirect, and elaborate chain reaction. Named after the American cartoonist and engineer Rube Goldberg, these machines typically use basic physics principles like gravity, momentum, and buoyancy in creative sequences. Each action triggers the next in a domino effect.