Adinda van’t Klooster and Nick Collins

AudioVirtualizer, 2019

VR experience for HTC Vive (Pro) and Oculus Rift

The AudioVirtualizer is a highly immersive VR experience allowing a user to explore an abstract landscape populated by sculptures and animated shapes, responsive to music through visual mappings driven by musical audio features. Adinda van ’t Klooster designed the system and the visual and interactive aspects, whilst Nick Collins created the underlying audio engine and provided machine-learning expertise that allowed the system to track mid and low level features in the sound. Audio was provided by both collaborators but could in theory be any kind of audio imported into the system. Nathan Flounders provided additional programming support for the interaction in the system.

 

The AudioVirtualiser is created for SteamVR and currently runs on the Vive Pro and Oculus Rift VR headsets. Graphics are generated in response to changes in low and mid level sound features. The aesthetic aim was to keep a strong sense of materiality through the use of drawings in the essentially digital landscape.

 

The software to play this VR artwork on your own headset is freely available at: viveport.com/b16fb967-aa1f-4487-9706-7b0800e6f2ad

 

The AudioVirtualiser (2019) was funded by Northern Bridge as part of an AHRC funded research fellowship at Durham University taken up by Dr. Adinda van ’t Klooster in 2019.

 

Duration: In the VR experience you can stay as long as you like in each of the three scenes, the walk-through video is 8 minutes and 11 seconds.

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VIDEO LINK

ABOUT THE ARTIST

UK-based Dutch artist Adinda van ’t Klooster works with drawing, animation, sound, light, sculpture, live audiovisual performance and recently VR. She has developed a range of responsive sound and light installations for city councils across the UK, and her work has been exhibited, performed and screened in China, the USA, Australia and Europe. In 2019 completed a postdoc position at the music department of Durham University where she created the AudioVirtualizer: a VR art installation that generates animations in Virtual Reality based on audio input, in collaboration with Prof. Nick Collins. Van ’t Klooster’s PhD explored the area of emotion research, and how different mapping strategies can be devised when physiological data is used as input in interactive artworks. She further explored this theme during the Affect Formations artist’s residency at the Durham music department when she created two interactive, live audiovisual performances, ‘BioCombat’ and ‘In a State’ in collaboration with other staff members. Adinda also taught 3D computer animation at Manchester Metropolitan University and New Media Art at Artez School of Art in the Netherlands and is currently based in Newcastle upon Tyne.

 

Nick Collins in a professor in composition at Durham University. His research interests include live computer music, musical artificial intelligence, and computational musicology, and he is a frequent international performer as composer-programmer-pianist, from algoraves to electronic chamber music. He co-edited the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music (Cambridge University Press 2007) and The SuperCollider Book (MIT Press, 2011), wrote the Introduction to Computer Music (Wiley 2009) and co-wrote Electronic Music (Cambridge University Press Introductions series, 2013). 

If you are interested in exhibiting or viewing this artistic VR experience, please send an email to us.

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