Alex Rex has a desire to bring material back into the world of sound– and we’re not just talking vinyl. Before getting his master’s degree in Industrial Design at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany, Alex worked as an apprentice organ builder and freelance designer. Some of his past projects, including “Sound Writer” and “Stereo”, explore the world of sound and its materialization in media, such as vinyl. As you can see in his portfolio, there is something particularly intriguing about the objects he builds. They scream out to us, “play with me!” His master’s thesis, AURA (Audio Reactive Artistry), is no exception. Using Arduino as a robotics tool, AURA is an open source project and art installation that transforms sound into physical motion of objects. We wrote to Alex to hear more about this exciting project and his involvement in the DIY world of Arduino.
What inspired AURA?
I have always been fascinated by the power that music and sound have on our feelings and moods. Sound is already a spatially perceptible impression. However, it cannot be experienced in all senses. With AURA I transfer sound on to other senses. The modular open source setup allows the creator to decide for himself to which senses he wants to transfer sound with AURA. He can transport sound into visible movements, but the transfer into tactile or haptic experiences is also conceivable.
What do you find meaningful about the visualization of music through motion? Does it expand the way we can define music?
With the invention of the phonograph (about 150 years ago), sound loses matter. At the latest since the 1920s and the invention of electric loudspeakers, the place, the action and the time at which sound is produced disappears from focus. Sound is now reproducible everywhere, anytime, without effort. When I walk through the city today and hear a piano from an open window, I might rather hear only the played recording of a piano. Nearly 150 years ago it was different, it was definitely a pianist playing a piano, at this very moment, in this very place, occupied with the action of playing the piano. The irrelevance of action, place and time of the sound production through the reproducibility of digital media today is strongly perceptible. The tendency towards haptic media is on the rise again. (Since 2006 vinyl sales figures have been rising in Europe). This desire for materiality in the world of sound that has become material less is something I encounter with AURA. AURA is an attempt to bring the material back into the world of sound. However, not by re-staging the real sound source, but by a further creative interpretation of itself.
The irrelevance of action, place and time of the sound production through the reproducibility of digital media today is strongly perceptible. The tendency towards haptic media is on the rise again.
It seems to me that installations like AURA could be wonderful additions to live concerts. How do you envision altering it for different types of concerts and musical genres?
AURA is the open source system that offers low-budget / mid-budget possibilities to transform sound into movement of matter. This setup offers the creative user every possibility to intervene himself. To decide what is moved, how it is moved and how it is triggered by sound. For my exemplary design IN THE WOODS (“The moving sticks”) slow monophonic music pieces and performances are suitable. However, the stepper motors can of course move other objects differently. In any case, the installation and the movement must be well matched to the music in order to ensure an immersive effect of the spatial performance to the music. Someone has already sent me a draft of AURA in which he controls water taps by the stepper motors and thus materializes music in water.
How are robotics influencing the art world? Do you have colleagues that also use microcontrollers like Arduino?
Robots will have a great influence on the art world in the next few years – or have had this influence for a few years already. Already at the Ars Elektronika in Linz 2019 I could see a lot of robot art projects. Many projects shock you or even make you fear an over automated future. But robots only become really shocking when you don’t even notice them anymore. So when they have already become part of our everyday life. Then I find it really dramatic, because in this dependency we are already becoming almost cyborgs. I mean, actually we have already become cyborgs through our daily use of smartphones. And this will become even stronger in the future through the influence of robots. I often work together with the people from HUGE FANCY (instagram: @hugefance) . You should check them out. It has not so much to do with music, but they are building a huge 3D printer and other projects that are done a lot with RASPBERRY PI or ARDUINO. The goal of the HUGE FANCY – Printer is to print a chair in under 1 hour. Of course, with such a big 3D printer you can also do other artistic projects. Let’s see what we will do with it in the future.
When did you become involved in the online DIY community? How’d you get into it?
Actually, I’m not very active in the open source community at the moment. 🙂 I do too many projects to maintain an online community intensively unfortunately! I would like to be more part of it. But I rather spend my time doing new projects than hanging out in online forums. So I have to find out how I can combine this better in the future. But I still think it’s great that people with similar interests can exchange ideas so intensively worldwide. I grew up in the 90s with 56k modem internet and I still remember how slow everything was back then. Even exchanging high resolution pictures was hard. Nowadays it is no problem to share 4k videos worldwide. This speeds up the information exchange enormously. Projects are getting faster and faster, bigger and bigger. Is it just a question of whether with the flood of projects the relevance of these will be lost at some point?
With AURA I started to work with the open source community and to place a projectthere myself. But I am still a bit overwhelmed by the many platforms and possibilities. It’s just all quite a lot out there on the internet 🙂 And it is not gonna get less!
One last technical question: Could you have split the frequencies of the audio source through a software instead of using the Spectrum Shield? If yes, what are the advantages to using the Spectrum Shield?
Hi cool, a technical question! … Yes, I certainly could have used software. But then I would have had to switch to a RASPBERRY or another more complex microcontroller. But I wanted to keep it with the Arduino as basic as possible and use as many ready-made components as possible. Better more parts – less digital code 🙂 Materialize the Immaterial!
To learn more about AURA and do it yourself you can go to http://www.alexrex.de/audioreactive/.
