Siren

"Siren" (2021) by Annie Lewandowski and Kyle McDonald, with set designer Amy Rubin.

"In Siren – Listening to Another Species on Earth, composer and performer Annie Lewandowski, artist and coder Kyle McDonald, and set designer Amy Rubin explore humpback whale song in a meeting of intelligences – humpback whale, human, and artificial. Their visually and sonically immersive piece reveals the wounded flourishing of the humpback whale, a species who continues to sing even as the menace of entanglement threatens its very existence. Siren celebrates the beauty and conservation legacy of the multi-platinum record Songs of the Humpback Whale on its 50th anniversary, while providing a window into the creative minds of our ancient mammalian relative in a contemporary experience of its ever-evolving song."

This repository includes the code for producing the lighting design for the installation.

Python

File structure

python/data/ should contain:

• .wav files that Annie recorded off Hawaiʻi island
• *.Table.1.selections.txt annotations exported from Raven
• .als file of Annie's composition

There is also an phrases.csv file that describes which phrase is matched to each unit for 022619_Solo with Shrimp_Bass_mcq_02-28-20. But this was replaced by the theme_to_units mapping in siren.py because, except for some ambiguous passages, all the units have a one-to-one mapping to themes for this song.

Install

After installing Anaconda:

conda create -n siren python=3.9
conda activate siren
git clone https://github.com/kylemcdonald/python-utils.git utils
conda install -y umap-learn jupyterlab ffmpeg-python pillow opencv matplotlib pandas librosa

I was also testing the Rapids implementation of UMAP:

conda create -n rapids-21.06 -c rapidsai -c nvidia -c conda-forge \
    cuml=21.06 python=3.7 cudatoolkit=11.2 -y

Running

1. Run Combine All Data.ipynb to produce the per-file lighting design (skip to "jump to this cell" if cached data is available).
2. Run Parse Ableton.ipynb to combine all the per-file lighting designs into one larger lighting design.

To edit the lighting design, change get_lighting() in Combine All Data.ipynb then re-run the last cell and re-run Parse Ableton.ipynb.

Updating for a new lighting configuration

1. Update python/settings.json with the correct fixture totals and re-run the notebooks.
2. Update the Super Sweet to have the correct number of output channels (in "Mapping" settings).
3. Change udpsend.js to specify the correct number of total channels.
4. Change expand.js to match RGB colors to the correct mapping for the fixtures.
5. Change combine-colors.js to specify the total inner and outer fixtures.

Fixture notes

Invisible Dog

• 12x local lights
• 8x global lights

Mass MoCA

• 20x CubeECHO: red, green, blue, white, amber, uv
• 6x ETC Selador Vivid R 11 inch: red, red-orange, amber, green, cyan, blue, uv, dimmer

Max

• DMXUSBPro.maxpat custom modifications to a patch from here.
• max-for-live.amxd is the main patch for playing back the lighting design. Drop it into a track in the Ableton set, press the script start messagebox to start the Node for Max script, then button to load the lighting design, and the checkbox to start the metro. The lighting design is loaded from an adjacent design.json file.
• Javascript for the Max for Live patch:
  • lighting-reader.js Node for Max script that loads the design.json and handles playback. Does not do any interpolation, so if it is possible to get higher framerates than the 60fps of the exported file, this is not accounted for.
  • deinterleave.js converts 6-channel DMX colors to a multi-plane format that is appropriate for a Jitter matrix.
  • lowpass.js for "blurring" the lighting output in a way that peaks reset the lighting, then slowly fade out.
• random-lights.py example of sending DMX over serial using Python. Useful for testing that the DMX device works.