“”Nausea Transformer”” by Branco, Dias and Diniz

The word “noise” comes from the Latin word nausea meaning “seasickness”, or from a derivative (perhaps Latin noxia) of Latin noceo = “I do harm”, referring originally to nuisance noise. Generally all non-musical sounds are considered to be noise. Noise is a complex concept and source material to deal with; it is an invisible architectural element with an undefined aesthetics. It deeply affects people and yet people feel very powerless to interact with or control it. The fundamental idea is to turn noise into a reprocessed living, evolving and tangible experience, by interacting spatially and temporally with the environment and its observers. Our purpose is to raise people’s awareness to sound, in all its forms: speech, non-speech sound (sound pollution sources) or natural sound, and treat it like data with a corporeal dimension. We aspire to convey an embodiment to an often neglected “hidden dimension”, by adding it to a phenomenology and a poetics of visual space. Building up on our research in interactive membranes [1] [2], we introduce “Nausea Transformer”: a sound reprocessed machine that unexpectedly can create pleasant behaviours by recycling noise into pleasant sound, therefore promoting new interactive experiences to a nearby audience.

1. Diniz, N, Branco, C, Dias M, and Turner, A: 2007, Morphosis: An Interactive membrane, in Gero, JS (ed) CAAD Futures ’07, 11–13 July 2007, Sydney, Australia. {forthcoming}.
2. Diniz, N and Branco, C: 2006, An Interactive membrane: Envisioning Physically Mutable Materials for Architecture, in Gero, JS (ed) Design Computing and Cognition ’06, 10–12 July 2006, Heindhoven, Holland.