AstroNoise

ASTRONOISE is an interactive Installation that invites people to play a game, and create sound improvisations with each other at the same time

Asteroids is a 2D game that was first released in 1979 on the Arcade by Atari, Inc.

The player controls a spaceship and attempts to shoot the asteroids without colliding with them

the spaceship can move by turning left, right, and thrust forward, shooting lasers at the asteroids would turn them into smaller pieces   

while both players must shoot each other down and at the same time dodging asteroids and bullets, they are triggering sounds which are linked to their position and how they thrust in space

The ships movements are mapped to a frequency modulation synthesis, where there is a modulated signal and a carrier signal when the ship trusts upwards or downwards it affects how high or low the carrier signal frequency would go, and when the ship would rotate it changes the modulated signal, combining both it results in a frequency modulated signal

The panning of the sound changes depending on your location in space, if a player is in the right side of the screen the sound would be panned to the right speaker and if the player would thrust to the left the sound would gradually be shifted to the left side

One of the crucial parts of the project was mapping the frequency modulation to the movement of the ship, because not only it had to be enjoyable and intuitive to play, but I also wanted people to be aware of the sounds they are generating and try to work and improvise with them

by playing the game the two players are performing sound improvisations which are playful and depending more on intuition rather than musical skills

I have also built two arcade cabinets, and installed two monitors with buttons to control the spaceships, the sound output is coming from stereo speakers placed within a distance from the arcade cabinets

This humorous and fun way of introducing noise and sound improvisation makes it very easy to create sound improvisations while enjoying themselves playing

Having humor as part of my previous works always helped to attract people and allows them to stay longer with the work, and this turns the artwork into a form of entertainment, and this helps people to come back to be part of the work more than once

Using noise as sound helps people not to worry of making mistakes while improvisations, plus staying under the loud nature of noise and being exposed to it for a longer duration, brings a cosmic more existential experience to playing the game, which I believe is quite important while making improvising