Tisch Stairwell Soundwalk

Our class project was to create a Soundwalk within the Tisch building. I worked in a group with my fellow students Chian Huang and Ella Chung.

Our idea was to record the audio of ourselves walking from the main entrance of Tisch up all 12 flights of stairs to the top of the building. We added sound effects to our recording that were inspired by the departments or activities of each floor.

To go on this soundwalk, enter the Tisch building located at 721 Broadway in New York City. Present your ID to the guard and walk to the stairs to the right of the elevator. Go through the door and walk up all the steps.

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Electronics Lab

Our assignment was to create something using switches. My goal was to use 3 switches and a 3 color LED to make a circuit that can produce any color.

First I wired a circuit with a 3 color LED, 3 1K Ω resistors, and 3 buttons, like so:

I am using my Arduino to power the board. Each button can be on or off, so this can produce 8 different colors. In the picture below I am activating the blue and red colors, making magenta.

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The Gaits: A High Line Soundwalk

A Soundwalk is a directed walk with a focus on listening to sounds instead of viewing sights. I went on The Gaits Soundwalk, a soundwalk commissioned by the High Line park in NYC. This is an above-ground park built on raised railway tracks abandoned years ago.

The Gaits Soundwalk is experienced with a phone app that only functions when the user's phone is actually on the High Line. I actually thought the app was broken when I arrived at the beginning of the High Line on Gansevoort St. It began making bell noises when I started to ascend the stairs.

For the first five minutes or so the Soundwalk consisted of only intermittent bell noises that would slow down or stop when I stopped walking. As I moved along, the walk got more interesting. The bells sped up, and then an organ was added. I heard water churning at several locations, and while at sections of the walk with seating for viewing parades or other city activity, I heard applause. There were also birds chirping in the section of the walk with a lot of trees. Unfortunately there was construction and scaffolding covering everything so there were no actual birds to be seen. Still, I do appreciate the synchronicity to the environment.

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The Art of Interactive Design

In Chris Crawford’s book, The Art of Interactive Design <https://www.amazon.com/Art-Interactive-Design-Euphonious-Illuminating/dp/1886411840/>`_, Crawford defines interactivity in terms of a conversation. Specifically, interactivity is a cyclical process of two actors taking turns listening, thinking, and speaking.

Unfortunately, the word "Interactive" is often explained or defined poorly, and as a result is poorly understood by our culture. The term gets added to products as a buzzword to make them sound better, but often the objects don’t really "interact" in a way as described by Crawford’s definition. There is no "conversation" or cyclical process.

A literal conversation between two people fits this definition literally, but when the interaction is between a human and an electronic device, the steps become input, process, and output. Key point though is that there are two actors, not one. Each actor is some kind of "purposeful creature," so a wall or a rug cannot be interactive.

It isn’t always clear if something is interactive or not. Rather than being a boolean thing, there are different degrees of interactivity. We can evaluate high or low levels of interactivity by evaluating the quality of the listening, thinking, and speaking steps. Excelling in one area does not compensate for failures in another. A common design error when building interactive products is to fail to appreciate this idea.

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