Jen Hsu 250B

This is Jennifer Hsu's 250B page

Current top three ideas (January 30, 2013)

Hourglass Electromagnetic string vibration with ferrofluid Violating binaural expectations

Electromagnetic string vibration with ferrofluid

I do not have a drawing of this, but I thought it would be interesting to place some string in ferrofluid and electromagnetically vibrate it. I would have to first figure out if it actually works and what kind of sounds come out of it. I like the pairing of the natural visuals that emerge from the ferrofluid coupled with whatever sound may come out. I do not have much experience with magnets, so it would be fun to learn more through this project.

Hourglass 1

Attach contact microphones to the ends of the hourglass. As the sand falls, the resonance of the chambers should change, so this would be kind of like amplifying the sounds of the sands falling in the hourglass and listening to how the resonance changes. The sounds would go out through speakers.

Hourglass 2

This is a modified version of the original hourglass idea. The concept is the same, but we add shakers onto some part of the hourglass to get feedback. I like the concept of this idea (involving the hourglass) because it forces the viewer to stare at time passing by. I think that this would be a fun thing to make and I would enjoy spending the time to tune the feedback.

Reverberant Plate

Gourd

Binaural

I want to make binaural microphones each of which would be attached to the outside of some headphones (or sound cancelling head gear stuff). Then we would switch the output between the left and right ears to give the listener a strange experience. This would violate their expectations of resonance and room reverberation. I think that this would fit the space because there are bound to be a lot of sounds in the installation space and that is the kind of environment where this idea would do best. I talked to Jonathan about this idea as well and how I could offer a switch or slider to change the experience (one side is normal -- left mapped to left and right mapped to right, and the other side is the switched experience).

I would be interested in adding feedback to the sound as well. I'm not sure how I would accomplish this since the microphones are on the outside of the headphones. I'll have to think about this part a bit more.