Fish make music

Submersed Songs is an installation by Vivian Caccuri that uses 4 live fish in a tank to control audio manipulations and processing.
The piece uses MaxMSP/Jitter to track the individual position of 4 fish in a tank, the resulting data is used to control spatialisation parameters, distortion and some other effects.
The idea is that visitors to the installation select 2 tracks from a library of .mp3 files. These are then subjected to various manipulations in order to create a new piece of audio.

"This sound-installation, winner of the Rumos Arte Cibernetica Prize (Itau Cultural Institute - Sao Paulo), promotes an interference of four carp fish in a glass tank, over the sound output of mp3 players (iPod's and others) of the visitors. The animals' movements and the proximity among them work as a parameter for modifying and juxtaposing the audience's music tracks in real time. With this idea, new sound landscapes are created, not only from the interaction among the fish, but also from unveiling the intimate music archives, which are "submersed" underneath the mp3 player devices.

The visitor can connect his audio device to the interface, and chose a song of his preference. It is also possible for the user to record the track in the system in order to let the song be modified during the next visitor's interactions. The visitor will as well listen to the previous visitors' songs, as the system juxtaposes the previous visitors' tracks with the current visitor's song. Accordingly, the piece will be always meshing up two different songs.

The two tracks are submitted to different modification processes, both building a real time continuity between the swimming of the carp fish and the levels of distortion, which can vary from an intense reverberation to a simulation of the hearing underwater."

Submersed Songs | Canções Submersas from ∆LEX on Vimeo