WAI-KNOT (Wireless Audio Interactive Knot)

Abstract

The Sound Transformer is a new type of musical instrument. It looks a little like a saxophone, but when you sing or "kazoo" into it, astonishing transforms and mutations come out. What actually happens is that the input sound is sent via 802.11 wireless link to a net server that transforms the sound and sends it back to the instrument's speaker. In other words, instead of a resonant acoustic body, or a local computer synthesizer, this architecture allows sound to be sourced or transformed by an infinite array of online services, and channeled through a gesturally expressive handheld. Emerging infrastructures (802.11, Bluetooth, 3G and 4G, etc) seem to aim at this new class of instrument. But can such an architecture really work? In particular, given the delays incurred by decoupling the sound transformation from the instrument over a wireless network, are interactive music applications feasible? My thesis is that they are. To prove this, I built a platform called WAI-KNOT (for Wireless Audio Interactive Knot) in order to examine the latency issues as well as other design elements, and test their viability and impact on real music making. The Sound Transformer is a WAI-KNOT application.