Mike Brinker

3+ ideas

1a. Social Music or what I like to call Musical People. Large scale social situations that involve many people moving about in the same space is rather an intrigueing cacaughany of noise. I would like to investigate further the idea of translateing one group of noises to another group and vice versa. Perhaps the sounds of two very distinct places (the Zoo and Times Sqaure or a Theme/Amusement Park and a Baseball Stadium. Or perhaps on a more extreme level, a church and a football game.)

1b. Taking the above into account, I would also like to take the same types of noises from all said places above, process them in a system similar to David Rokeby's A Very Nervous System and output that modulation back to a different crowd scenario. ex. Take all different types of crowd movement, assign certain rhythms/beats/synth/musical notes/midi instruments to crowd behaviors (more people on the sidewalk than street, more people crossing the street than on the sidewalk, more cars than people, etc) and output that same system to another crowd in a different location. I think some interesting musical patterns would emerge.

2. Eavesdropping on conversations is interesting, but more so in fragments than in their entirety. I would like to explore conversation samplings from different locations and have random sentences pulled out and then linked together to form a sort of dialogue between spaces. The conversation generated would be attuned to something more along the lines of, "what does the space have to say, rather than the people in it." eg. User listens to a sampling from a location and says "All the conversations coming from the second floor Zemeckis lab are always negative". I think this could be done in Max/MSP. To pull the pieces of sentences together, the system could watch for pauses in discussions. The user should also have the ability to "MadLib" the conversations in order to piece together their own dialogue. aka They choose which locations they want pieces pulled from, line them up, and the system generates a string of random sentences together.

3a. I really need to return to my gaming interests. In order to do so, I would like to develop an interactive problem solving atmosphere, much like what Uru: Ages Beyond Myst is trying to do. The emphasis would be on attaining a similar goal through a series of complex moves and operations performed by more than one user or "inhabitant" of a 3D virtual space. Imagine if you will, a 1st person shooter environment that places you in a rat like maze. You soon realize that you can manipulate the environment and that you are not alone! Your quest is to change the structure of your environment with your co-inhabitants in order to crack the code of the "level" without the use of speech. This game summed up in one sentence "Adventures of Lolo meets Tetris with a 1st person co-op deathmatch party game without the heavy artillary twist". Follow that?

3b. Same as above, but put all 3 or 4 players in the same environment, make it immersive and see what happens. They could, of course, talk to each other, so that element would be left in for strategic purposes. The goal would be to solve the puzzle in a certain amount of time, then advance to the next level. I haven't worked out the tech hurdles yet. Projectors anyone?