Call() and Response()

Call() AND RESPONSE()

Conceptual Design / P5.JS / HTML + CSS (2019)

Inspired by the famous musical interaction in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Call() and Response() allows a human to perform a duet with a collection of digital entities that can respond and compose their own melodies. Driven by both machine-learning pitch detection and randomized, fractal-based pattern creation, this digital experience was the final computational design piece for SCI 6338: Introduction to Computational Design, and is a means to explore human-machine creative collaboration.

Experience Design

During the experience, the human participant sings or speaks into a microphone, and in real time, the digital entities respond with a new melody of similar length based on the participant’s original input. It is possible for the participant to allow the digital entities ‘to take the lead,’ building a back and forth where both the human and digital composing parties riff off of one another. However, it is just as interesting to push the experience to its limits by providing unexpected or difficult to interpret inputs. By allowing human participants to glean more about how the digital entities listen, learn, and compose through interaction and collaboration, this experience showcases how collaborative auditory-visual experiences can provide unique perspectives into complex systems that underlie them.

Final Piece

Call() and Response() was performed during the culminating exposition for SCI 6338: Introduction to Computational Design, and won the “Most Technically Challenging” Award during the proceedings. A video is included below of the piece performing live. For those interested in trying it out and viewing the code, the interactive experience can be viewed online at the following locations —

Demo (Firefox recommended): https://sharmasas.github.io/callandresponse/

Github Repository: https://github.com/sharmasas/callandresponse