Northwestern University's Casey Farina And Project CONDOR: The Blimp Thing
Project Condor isn't quite that, but cool nonetheless. Electronic Musician and Northwestern University doctoral candidate Casey Farina is a percussionist, composer, sound designer, music educator, and new media artist working in Chicago. His current work focuses on nonlinear and iterative processes as applied to music composition and multimedia art. He's the guy in charge of "The Blimp Thing," as my friend and I and a lot of us started calling it.
Project CONDOR explores the presentation of spatial audio via miniature robotic airships. Blimps. With Speakers.
The whole thing took quite a bit of prep, and we'll explore it over several videos at Gearwire. Check out this first installment and get a feel for Casey and his Blimps.
CASEY FARINA: My name is Casey Farina. I guess as far as this project goes, I’m a new media artist and music -- musician at Northwestern University.
Well, the idea for Project CONDOR was originally based on the idea of we present spatial sound normally which is most often an array of stationary speakers, 8, 36, or whatever how many speakers, and then we usually move the sound around the speakers, sort of [INDISCERNIBLE] or advanced panning system, and I wanted to try and think about actually moving the sound sources themselves, making some moving speakers, and so the best way I thought about going about that was flying speakers.
[CLIP OF A PROJECT CONDOR FLYING SPEAKER IN ACTIVE USE]
And so, the project was originally conceived with tiny remote control helicopters with speakers on them, and after some research it was pretty obvious that that was going to be incredibly dangerous for everybody involved. Essentially, it would have whirling saws flying around with speakers on them which we would have limited control over, so that wasn’t going to work. So then we started thinking about blimps.
[CLIP OF A PROJECT CONDOR FLYING SPEAKER IN ACTIVE USE]
Essentially, we just have gigantic floating balloons with propellers on them.
[CLIP OF A PROJECT CONDOR FLYING SPEAKER IN ACTIVE USE]
And we’re able to control their movements. More or less, that’s getting better but we don’t have -- The danger level of the whole project is significantly lower. Essentially, they’re just gigantic balloons, and if they bump into the wall, it’s no big deal. If they bump into each other, it’s no big deal. And so -- And that also allowed us to carry significantly more weight than we would have with the helicopters so that we’re able to use much bigger speakers with much more of a frequency range. So, we’re able to create much lower sounds than we would have in any other sort of instance.
The project was funded by CIRA, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts at Northwestern University.
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