"Which is your brass's voice?" is an art installation employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital media to create an engaging multi-sensory experience for the audience.
Created by Aether & Hemera for the International Brass Festival 2012 in Durham, the installation invites people to discover their brass voice by speaking, singing, shouting or whispering into microphones. Each of the five microphones represents a specific brass instrument: Trumpet, Trombone, Tuba, Muted Trumpet and French. Horn sounds are generated capturing the individual nuances of volume, pitch and the intonation of people's voices.
The AI software behind the artwork records all the notes performed and creates a new music composition at the end of the event. The sequence of notes gathered from the microphones becomes the seed of new compositions generated from the large musical knowledge-base of hundreds of brass scores a note at a time. The brass sounds played back through surrounding speakers are synchronized with the light events of an array of coloured LEDs to create a fully immersive 'synesthetic' experience for the visitors.
"Synaesthesia" is a condition in which a stimulus in one sensory modality automatically induces a sensation in another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a colour.
"Which is your brass's voice?" surrounds the visitors with sounds and colours that respond to their performance and that are based on the synesthetic theory, with particular reference at Scriabin's association of colour and music.
The installation creates a cycle of interaction that transforms viewers into performers, immersing them in an ambience consisting of sound, lights and real-time processing; its behavior is entirely based on the involvement of the public thus embodying interaction and encouraging social participation.