Interactive/Immersive Art

This is a showreel that highlights a number of interactive audiovisual projects and experiments designed, programmed, and composed by Spencer Bambrick prior to 2022.

Movement, Sound, & Color

This video showcase three technical demos, created for the Waveforms 2023 Open Call for Artists at the Museum of Science in Boston, MA. Each demo consists of a custom particle effect containing 100,000 particles, made in the Unity3D Game Engine with it’s powerful VFX Graph tool. Each effect responds in a unique way to different user “input." One responds to color via webcam, another responds to sound taken from a computer microphone, and the third responds to movement via mouse velocity and location.

Spaceialization

Spa{ce}ialization is an interactive surround (7.1) installation, premiered at the Berklee College of Music Multichannel Performance Space in April 2022. It was developed in the Unity3D Game Engine with original generative music and procedural visuals. The visuals are heavily inspired by cosmology and particle physics. The background is an artistic rendering of the cosmos, setting the stage for players to interact with mysterious spheres that represent subatomic particles. When an interaction occurs, smaller, energetic particles emerge as they can when actual particles interact. Sound also plays an important role in this work. In video games, sound effects are always spatialized, emanated from an object in 3D space. Spa{ce}ialization takes this concept further by presenting a three-dimensional scene where players can interact directly with musical elements in a multichannel space. When all particles have been “activated,” a collective particle interaction takes place and the music climaxes.

Procedural Music Engine: Drum Machine

This is the first in a series of technical demos, documenting a the creation of a custom procedural music engine (prototype) built in Max and integrated into the Unity Game Engine using Open Sound Control.

Virtual Reality Music & Sound Effects

This is an early technical demonstration of music and sound for the game A Haunting: Witching Hour for Playstation 4 VR.

Planet Cycles (Stereo-Mixdown from a Multichannel Application)

This is a stereo-mixdown of Planet Cycles, an interactive synthesizer that sonifies the ratios of each planet in our solar system. In other words, the pitch and rhythm of each sound in this track are proportional to the orbit of a corresponding planet. The surround mix also approximates the elliptical such that the listener is at the center of the orbit. This system was created from scratch using Cycling 74's Max/MSP.

Fractal Sketches

The videos below are part of a series of experiments using the Processing IDE to create interactive audiovisual applications. Each of these apps involve some form of fractal artwork/scripting, usually paired with mouse coordinates acting as input and changing the color, angle, and Mandelbrot number (fractal depth or complexity) of the visuals. In some cases audio is also used as an input, changing the hue. The music was written for the app as well and is triggered when the sketch opens. “Crazy Geometry” is a sketch that takes fractal complexity to the extreme and uses mouse position to change the angle, Mandelbrot number, and translates entire sections of the visuals into new locations. The overall effect is that the player is actually exploring a procedurally created landscape in real-time, sometimes landing on unexpected and beautiful patterns. In all cases these sketches were inspired by, and heavily reliant on the information found in Daniel Shiffman’s book, Learning Processing.

Dots

Dots is an interactive application created in the Processing IDE and very much inspired by generative music titans like Brian Eno. This is a simple application where players click a button and a "dot" pops onto the screen with a randomized location, color, and size. The pitch and timbre of the dot is depending on each of those three parameters. The effects is a relaxing ambient soundscape generated by the player and randomization factors.