Light
We started building a kaleidoscope with glass stones inside in order to create shiny light effects. What we obtained was a nice effect but not the one we needed. LEDs were another approach to light definition: we tested colored LEDs, high-power LEDs with integrated lens and strip LEDs, the ones that we chose at the end.
We focused, later, on solving the problem of the spreading of the incense. We built a “home-made” censer using a tea infuser ball, incense granules (typically used during religious rituals) and a carbon disk that, once burned, lets the incense spread away. But to have a good result with incense, you have to swing the censer: we needed servo-motors but there was also the problem of where set the censer. We looked, then, for an electrical one and thought about building it but it was more difficult than expected: at the end we thought that an incense vaporizer would be the optimal solution.
Information
Auditum uses thermocromatic ink in order to gives the information in a suggestive and unexpected way. We tested the suggestion of the words through the thermochromatic ink using a thermocromatic film pre-printed from a local factory. The thermochromatic film we had required a temperature of 50 degrees Celsius (but it’s possible to have a colder one, 30 degrees Celsius) in order to reveal the words hidden behind it: we heated our thermochromatic film with an electrical resistor taken from an hair straightener (be careful using this kind of experimental tool: it’s not so safe).
Sound
The aim for the sound aspect of Auditum was to build a system to control the existence and the persistence of the human voice during the playing of choir track. When someone speaks over the choir during the “procession”, the volume of the choir decreases. To achieve this we worked initially with an effect known as sidechain (made with a trial version of Reaper, a sound engineering software). The sound of the choir is pre-filtered with an HiPass filter with a cutoff frequency around 671 Hz; the noise detected from the microphone instead, is filtered with a LowPass filter with a level of 650 Hz. All noises between 0 and 650 Hz produce a decreasing of the volume of the choir. This system proved quite difficult, because it needs very precise calibration on-site. For the prototype we decided to use a program built in Processing and check the “noise” as the volume that exceeds the average volume of the choir.
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