TUNES OF SURVEILLANCE
An experiment to capture the emotions of people when they are subjected to surveillance
"HOW WOULD YOU REACT WHEN SUBJECTED TO SURVEILLANCE?"
About the Project
Tunes of Surveillance, an experiment project carried out as a part of "Materials exploration for probing" within the context of surveillance.
The concept of the project was to create a probe to collect information(in the form of emotions) from the participants when they are shown variant scenarios of surveillance.
The last project on surveillance gave insights that how surveillance is ingrained in our society and how people are unaware of the above and the implication it can have they are subjected to it.
Timeline:
10 days
My role:
Concept Development, Prototyping, video montage, product design, and Execution
Tools used:
Arduino, and Adobe XD
Solution
The experiment consists of a Tune box, made of Arduino and a video montage. Using the following artefact, the emotions and reaction of people were recorded and at the end of the experiment had to reflect upon the culmination of emotions in the form of different tunes
THE CHALLENGE
How to capture the emotions of the participants when they are subjected to surveillance or are shown the implications of surveillance that can take place in their daily lives?
The probe has two parts to it: a product made of Ardunio (which would generate tunes) with screens(of a mobile phone) for participants to interact with it and a video montage(without any sound), would show different scenarios of surveillance.
To understand how people respond to the idea of surveillance, the idea is to visually show the participants implications of surveillance, positive and negative, through fictional scenarios. After which, the participants will be asked to react to it by selecting their emotion. This emotion would then be heard in the form of a tone on the Arduino board through pressing buttons for respective emotions.
Probe
TUNE BOX
VIDEO
MONTAGE
Concept
The probe was developed on the concept that the tones or music play a great role in inducing certain emotions in us. For example, any situational video when played with music off can be interpreted in different ways. As opposed to, when played with music on, the video will most likely be perceived with singular emotions. So, the music in the video montage is muted, to get a variant emotion from the participants regarding scenarios of surveillance.
Initial Idea
Block Diagram
TUNES/
NOTES
USER
OUTPUT
PC ARDUINO
INTERFACE
ARDUINO
BOARD
PHONE
INTERFACE
INPUT
Product
The product designed was to nest the screen on the top for participants to interact with, along with Arduino setup with buttons and speakers below the screens.
Arduino encased in the box with speakers
Mobile Screen
with the slider for emotion
The screens showing different emotions for participants to interact with. After iteration-I, the screen was designed with sliders in a horizontal manner, as it was much easier to understand what is shown in the screen, as said by a few participants
Screens
BEFORE
How does it work?
Seeing the video montage on various scenarios of surveillance
Pausing the video and choosing the emotion in the emotion slider box
The screen displays the color of the emotion followed by the relevant tunes
The video continues, and at every scenario
it asks for the users' emotion
Collective notes(for all the received emotions) is played
Reflective thinking by the participant based on the pattern on the notes
The captured reaction was different for everybody at different scenarios
Observations
The users followed the tune pattern and were able to relate to many scenarios
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Since the work exhibited was a partial working model, as there were some technical difficulties while executing the final design of the product. The future model will have an interface coded with p5.js and the tunes will be generated on the selection of the emotions.
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Based on the feedback, the range of secondary emotions can also be included, instead of using the primary ones.
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Another interesting feedback was including various tunes of the methods of surveillance like the tapping sound of the keyboard when someone is furiously tracking on the pc, beeping sound of the sensor, etc. instead of assigning tunes to the emotion.
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Since the tone generated was more digital, and was hardly resonating with its respective emotions, there will be an attempt to try and include the actual sound of the emotions.
Next Steps