Barbara Nerness's Internship Highlights: Die Kunst des Sommerpraktikums
Barbara Nerness: Die Kunst des Sommerpraktikums | The Art of the Summer Internship
I spent ten weeks at Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) Karlsruhe (Center for Art and Media), where I had one large coding project that took eight weeks to complete, and one large artistic project resulting in a show after my seventh week. The coding project consisted of writing Max/MSP patches to control a Mackie MCU Pro Universal Controller. The Mackie is a high end physical interface with faders and buttons that sound engineers use with digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as Pro Tools. Because a lot of guest artists use patching software such as Max/MSP or Pd, my task was to write Max patches to interact with the Mackie, controlling the faders, buttons, vpots, and infinity wheel. The complexity of the project came from the fact that the MIDI messaging system supported by Mackie is proprietary, and thus not publicly available. I found one engineer in an online Max forum who had reverse-engineered a different Mackie controller, which helped me to understand the nature of MIDI messaging, which uses hexadecimal message pairs, and their implementation on the Mackie. However, not all of the document I found was correct, so I had to do some of my own reverse-engineering. Because I had never worked with the MIDI protocol before, it took some time to understand and use the right Max objects. Yet once it clicked after the seventh week, I was extremely happy, and even ended up using these patches in my own personal video project that I will describe later. Customizing MIDI controllers is quite a common practice in the field of interactive audio, and I now feel confident implementing this in my own work. It will be a great skill to have going forward, as MIDI has been around since the 1980s and is still in wide use today. Lastly, my boss on the project gave me some guidance throughout on tailoring my user interface to meet the needs of sound artists, which is very important. I discovered a love of building tools for creative users, and have an idea for PhD research that utilizes these skills to build interfaces and instruments for people with learning or physical disabilities.
My second large project was much more creative and artistic, as I had the opportunity to design visuals for the large summer event in Karlsruhe called Karlsruher Museumsnacht (KAMUNA) that brings together arts institutions, museums, and galleries in Karlsruhe for a one-night show across the city. Common to many large cities in Germany, museum nights celebrate the art and culture of the area and I love the concept. ZKM was a big participant with shows not only on-site but at three other galleries across the city. The sound from the off-site shows was streamed back to ZKM, where engineers and artists remixed and re-represented it live in multiple spaces. My task was to create visuals that interacted with this audio using an audio to video converter called the Synchronator. The Synchronator is actually a digital implementation of the effect that is achieved when sending an audio signal into the video input of an analog tube television. Unfortunately, using any random audio signal does not look good, as the frequencies that create interesting horizontal, vertical, and modulating shapes are dependent on the refresh rate of the screen (usually 50 Hz or 60 Hz). In order to find these ‘interesting’ frequencies, I performed sine sweeps, using both analog and digital equipment. I found that frequencies in the kilohertz range looked much better, and that combinations of these frequencies resulting in amplitude or phase modulation created very pretty effects. I used the amplitude and pitch (from the largest peak) of the live audio stream to further modulate the frequencies themselves, which created more movement for louder and higher frequencies. You can see a short documentation of the final show below.
