Sonic Art & Sound Design- P22:Sonic art is a new art form, or rather, forms. As we shall see, it can encompass a wide range of activities, perhaps wider than almost any other art form. It is an unusual case, based upon a medium that has traditionally been regarded as inferior and subservient to other creative or expressive forms. | INTERACTIVITY on a computer and have software readily available. It follows from this that devices of this nature are normally the first port of call since they offer plug and play use. If however our needs are more complex say in three dimensions we may need to consider devices that are far more complex and may require specially written software. However some established systems allow a very useful degree of flexibility but remain reasonably userfriendly. For example the EyeCon system uses a webcam to capture a video image and track specified means that it can easily be set to provide information about gesture from the basic image and this can then interact with the rest of the system. Sometimes despite the wide range of off-the-shelf products we are simply unable to acquire the technology that we need in ready-made form. This is not a cause for despair nor should it necessarily imply a need to rethink the approach being taken. If the technology we need does not exist it can be surprisingly easy to make it ourselves. Here we enter into the newly defined realm of physical considers novel ways of getting information into and out of computers extending them beyond the possibilities offered by traditional interfaces and controllers. There are many forms of transducer that can be easily acquired obvious examples might include infrared movement sensors and burglar alarm pressure mats or we may even wish to go further still and build our own. Whatever we decide to use the trick is to find an effective way of taking the information provided by the sensor and translating it into a form that our computer finds digestible. One of the most versatile ways to do this is the so-called microcontroller module. These are small-scale computers in their own right and connect to the main computer by the USB or serial can accept input from almost anything that can provide an on off or variable voltage microcontroller needs to be .
