Hi everybody! I’m a first year grad student in the Music & Technology program at Carnegie Mellon University. I did my undergrad in Electrical Engineering from LUMS, Pakistan. Most of my previous work has been hardware intensive, although I have experience of using MAX along with a few scripting languages. Being part of various underground bands in the past, I also consider myself as a musician. At CMU, I’m part of the A Cappella group Deewane. From this course, I’d like to take away how to put together today’s technology to make something that impacts people- along side, I’m excited to explore computer-driven visualization and the truth it uncovers. My previous works can be looked at my website http://harisusmani.com
Twitter: @uzmani90
GitHub: https://github.com/harisusmani
Suspended Motion (Fall 2013)
Suspended Motion is an arts-engineering project based on a Philosophical Theme revolving around Scientism. I came up with the idea, wrote/did the narration and made the first prototype. Then we incorporated an eight channel setup to enhance the experience further along with a re-worked audio.
Course Project for Advanced SIS: Hybrid Instrument Building (Prof. Ali Momeni, Fall 2013)
Suspended Motion is a setup that tends to make the user believe that he/she is in a state of motion on a spinning chair, while in fact for most part of the experience the user remains stationary. It is based on a Philosophical Theme revolving around Scientism.
Today, we all live in the Age of Science and we embrace everything that science brings with it. Just look around and you will find that we are surrounded by technology that was just science fiction some decades ago- but this sometimes tends to make us believe that Science is the most authoritative worldview: it has all the answers to our questions and it alone can explain the true inner working of the universe- only science can answer how the universe came about, how we evolved or what our purpose in this world is. Suspended Motion gives a different perspective on the topic.
Suspended Motion II (Group Work) consists of a rotating-chair and an eight speaker array below which the user sits. The user is instructed to close his eyes and to observe how the sound field exactly matches his current position. This is done by angular position data sent to the laptop via OSC from an iPhone’s Compass attached to the chair. After about 40 seconds, the chair is let go to set off in a decelerating rotation. The user focuses on the sound, and experiences Suspended Motion for the last 25 seconds of his spin.
(Disclaimer: Lock Howl-Storm Corrosion from the 2012 release “Storm Corrosion” is the copyrighted property of its owner(s).)