Soundscape (Wave Alchemy) – Anirudh Sharma

Sawada D., Sharma A., et al. 2013. Wave Alchemy: Perception and Reminiscence of Expressive Moments through Waves. ACM CHI 2013. Paper

Wave Alchemy prototype — Physical waveform sculpture constructed from an array of pin-actuated rods with spherical terminations, exhibiting a double-helix standing wave configuration. The prototype embodies the transduction of acoustic or kinetic energy into a tangible three-dimensional waveform rendered in Radical Atoms.

Team: Dan Sawada, Anirudh Sharma, Sujoy Kumar Chowdhury, Christine Hsieh, Andrea Miller
Context: Done as a project for 99 Fridays. Paper accepted as a note at CHI 2013.

Life is full of moments that come with obvious or subtle expressions of energy. It is common for us as human beings to attach different emotions to such expressions. And yet when we want to capture it and interact with it, we are often constrained to flat, 2D encapsulations of video, audio, or photographic recordings. Moreover, the way we would look back at a memory in this digital age is now often through a screen with hundreds of files digitally stored away, further removing the experience of the event's emotion.

What if we had a way to experience this emotional energy again, and dynamically interact with it in infinitely complex ways? Here we present a concept and prototype that explores a novel physical-visual language of dynamic, emotionally expressive waveforms, designed to transform the way we perceive different forms of energy as we go about our daily lives. With the power of computations hidden within the physical materials used in the interface, we create an interactive form made of Radical Atoms that can take one form of energy and transmute it into a waveform as its output, or Wave Alchemy.

Demonstrated at MIT Museum exhibitions on embodied HCI.