sindhooja-mullapudi/pulsingroom

Pulsing Room

Project Description:

For me sentience means to feel alive, intimate, and full of emotion. With that definition in mind, for the final project for this class I drew the inspiration from the saying “walls have ears and doors have eyes”. The saying, to me, suggested that even inanimate objects have the ability to be “alive” with the help of humans. The very definition of being alive is having a heartbeat; without a pulse a person is pronounced dead, which is why I chose to use a human’s pulse to show that a room can be “alive” too.

In order to create a space that feels like a living breathing environment, I made the choice to make sound and light respond to the human pulse—since “walls have ears” the sound was to represent that, and the light was to represent that “doors have eyes”. To show that a space can respond to intimacy. I had a tone set that would play rhythmically to a human’s pulse rate and a light set around the room, to do the same. Depending on how fast or slow a person’s pulse is, the room would respond with the sound and light. I purposefully used a dark room to play with this idea because I associated being dead to a dark space, and the only thing making that room or space alive is the pulse, itself.

In the videos I took to present this project, I asked my sister to stimulate the sound and light. I asked her think about different thoughts to play around with different pulse rates. The slow pulse made the room feel calm while the fast pulse created a more anxious feeling within me, as an audience. The fast pulse rated resulted in faster tone changes and faster blinking of the light. This truly did make it seem like the room was alive, towards the end of filming, I had the urge to turn all the lights on and stop sound and the blinking. Because of technical difficulties and restraints, I could not completely put out my whole vision for this project (which was to add a motor to make the blinds move with the pulse and much more) but I do want to pursue this in the future and make this instillation a better and intimate experience.

Technical Description:

The main new material I used for this project was a pulse sensor. It was a great experience working with this, because just the process of trying to make my pulse do small things like turning on an Led was a very intimate experience for me. When, at the end, the whole room seemed to be “responding” to my pulse, it was such a different feeling. I also used an LedStrip to light up and down the dark room depending on my pulse. And the last material I used was a speaker to set out a tone that responded to my pulse as well. A couple things that I couldn’t use, but I wish I could, was a motor (to play with the blinds—the motor I got from amazon was broken and I didn’t have time to order and get a new one ) and an amplifier (to make the tone sound louder and emphasize that effect in the room—but by the time I realized I needed one it was too late to order and use it). But these two materials are something I plan on using and developing for this project in the future.

For this project I also had to install the PulseSensor Playground library on Arduino, that helped with both the LedStrip blinking and the tone for the speaker.

Documentation:

Link to videos: PLEASE WATCH VIDEOS ON FULL VOLUME AS THE SPEAKER IS NOT THAT LOUD https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1q888RSGDhKFre9wx1TGPYzhIBs0WHkkM?usp=sharing