ATT, acoustical table tennis, is a mixture of a performance and a audio-visual installation for 8 or 12 speakers spread over the room, 1 table tennis ball, a video projector and a computer.
The sound materials are live sampled table tennis balls and the composition rules are derived from the table tennis rules.
ATT pipe: live sampling of the table tennis ball
The speakers are divided in 2 players (one player at the right, one at the left side - see picture2) and they are controlled via specific probability functions (markov chains).
The game is over if one player reaches 21 points (like in the original game rules). The current points of the players are displayed very large with a video projector.
As an additional dimension the room/place comes into the game: With the 12 speakers the table tennis field is enlarged and the listeners can walk through this field hearing the "acoustical balls" flying from one player to the other.
ATT speakers: speaker arrangement, the two players
In contrast to the "real" table tennis more and more balls are sampled and get into the game. So a very complex sound network becomes spread over the whole room/place.
The exciting thing: You never know in advance which player wins and how much time he will need to eliminate the adversary!
ATT interface: PD patch interface
This project is realized explicitly with open source software under Linux.
For audio-synthesis, generating the video-display and all the program logic I used Pd and made some stuff in C for PD.
For the live-sampling I built a transparent pipe with an integrated microphone. So you can see the table tennis balls springing inside the pipe when they get sampled (see first picture).
I rebuild the table tennis rules with 2nd order markov chains, also implemented inside PD. The samples of the balls are stretched with some kind of granular synthesis - so the "2 players" can shoot their balls with "different velocities", different heights, etc.
Duration: ca. 10-15 minutes
