Nature Deism, QUAN Zerui

Hearing Nature, Audio-visual Interaction for Urban Ecology Using Bio-inspired Media

Nature is like improvised music, it is a combination of mechanism and organicism, an opposition between order and chaos, and the title ‘Deism’ symbolises the rational spirit of human understanding of nature. By linking the two through mathematics, using algorithms and machine learning techniques, and using a mobile phone app as a vehicle, nature becomes listenable and more people are engaged, a new connection between humans and nature is created.

After research, I have designed an algorithm that can transform nature into music. Through it, we can hear flowers, grass, trees and many other plants around us. Here is the exact logical framework. I first collected a part of the data of the plant, including images and Fibonacci data, the former can be provided to the ai for recognition learning, the latter will enter two sets of algorithms I wrote to make the series into melody and harmony respectively, I call it mechanical music 1.0, which will enter the recurrent neural network magenta to generate music 2.0. The algorithm gives the music the mechanical, while machine learning brings chaos and organicity to the music.

I set up different plants as four vocal parts of the orchestra – plant soprano, plant baritone, plant bass player and plant chorus – and created characterisations for them, which can be chosen freely by the user.

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