Room Tone
Room Tone is a digital musical instrument that explores the relationship between my mental health and my environment. I designed the instrument in 2020 to capture how my relationship with anxiety has changed over the course of the pandemic, when I was forced to stay home more than ever, and found solace in connecting with nature.
The physical components of the instrument are three soil-moisture sensors which are in three plants, and a gyroscope which I sewed onto a gardening glove. These sensors are hooked up to an Arduino Uno, which sends their data back into my computer. This data is processed by a Max MSP patcher. All coding work was completed in C++ and Max.
I thought of the instrument as having 4 voices: one for each plant, and one for me. The sounds that made up each of these voices were samples of either nature noises for the plants, such as a storm or wind, or human and “household” for my voice, like a heartbeat or microwave beep.
The moisture levels of the plants control the speed of playback for their tracks, while the gyroscope reads the position of the hand to trigger changes in the sound. By using a gyroscope to trigger sounds, I was able to give the sense of keying into different invisible areas around the instrument and unlocking the internal soundtracks of the environment and myself. Strangely, I discovered that the lack of touch required to play the instrument made the performance feel more intimate.
