Void Noir
Void Noir is a digital sound installation that
Visitors in an experimental way and
A way of listening to your inner self.
A course project by Tom Strobl, Dimtry Babin, Mate Sipos and Vincent Oliva, 4th semester, 2021
Supervising lecturers: Owi Mahn, Prof. Thorsten Greiner, Michael Rieker & Tutors: Fritz Krüger, Matthias Hassel
The stress and hustle and bustle of everyday life often obscure our own emotions and prevent us from easily accessing our inner selves. ‘Void Noir’ is a virtual space that brings this inner self to the fore, thereby granting direct access to one’s own inner self. As a virtual visitor, you are immersed in an emotionally charged soundscape that manifests itself depending on your own behaviour.
When you enter our digital sound installation, a cloud-like entity immediately appears, which reacts in various ways to the movements of the character controlled in first-person mode. It is, so to speak, a reflection of one’s inner emotional state. If you remain calm, the cloud responds with correspondingly calm movements and sounds. However, as soon as you start to move quickly and frantically, this affects the inner being, which manifests itself in increasingly aggressive movements and sounds.
Here’s an example of the soundscape that awaits you in ‘VoidNoid’.
Insert audio
The spatial installation was created in the Unity development environment, which communicates with the MAX/MSP programme via OSC to generate the spatial sound. Data generated in Unity is sent to MAX/MSP, where it is used as the basis for triggering and modulating parameters. The sounds generated in MAX/MSP are decoded into an Ambisonics signal, thereby creating a binaural audio track which, when listened to through headphones, produces a realistic 3D soundscape. To achieve this, we have developed our own scripts for both Unity and MAX/MSP, which primarily make the motion signals generated in Unity understandable to MAX/MSP, so that they can be used there as the basis for sound design. Below, you can take a look at our MAX/MSP patch.
The sound installation focuses on the cloud and audiovisual interaction. As soon as you enter the virtual space, the cloud takes flight and begins to emit sounds. There are three different sound beds as a basis, which blend into one another depending on how much you move and evoke different moods through their sound. In addition, further sounds are triggered at various moments, such as when the cloud rises or descends.
