Specialising and Exhibiting

Making An alcohol detector with MaxMSP

This week, I am building up a sound installation connecting with the OL factory. I was talking with Ekea about what could I do as smell contains a lot of limitations. She made three perfumes with fine artists and made three pieces of music for these: chaos, silence, and calm. From my personal perspective, smell is really a soft sense cause it gives you a long experience and it is not as mean as vision.

I would like to build up an alcohol tester which would definitely work for element 2 also. I was thinking if I could make the items that would be tested by smelling having diverse purities of alcohol.

Alcohol detector using Arduino and MQ3 sensor

It took ages to make it work but the sensitivity was really underwhelming so I would like to make it more detailed in the future. This is the plan:

The data after the switch is pressed for 6 seconds
Alcohol testing levels:
<200 air (the air is only recommended to be tested before starting all alcohol tests, there is no alcohol in the air. Or wait for 1 minute to test)

200 <300 Air, maybe trace alcohol
300 <400 The air contains a small amount of alcohol
400 <500 low alcohol content
500 <600 lean towards low to medium alcohol content
600 <650 moderate1 alcohol content
650 <700 moderate2 alcohol content
700 <750 moderate 3 alcohol content
750 <800 high alcohol content
800 <850 strong alcohol content
850 <900 burst alcohol content
900 exaggerated alcohol content

but this means I have to make 12 different sounds also…I begin to think what kind of sounds what be interesting rather than field recordings. It need to be something very stimulus to your mind, but at the same time, very short like 15-30 seconds.

SMELL AND SCIENCE
The interest in smell shown by writers of the nineteenth century
was also manifested by scientists. Whereas literature tended to
glorify smell, however, science tended to depreciate it. Already in
the sixteenth century, René Descartes had made it clear that the
sense of science was to be sight and this position was strengthened
in the following centuries. Smells, so bard to measure, name or
recreate, were undoubtedly among the least accessible sensory
stimuli to the methods of science.
None the less, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
when science was avidly exploring the former domains of religion,
folklore and alchemy, odours were for a time an important subject
of scientific investigation and discourse. Human odours, for
example, were enthusiastically, if not very reliably, classified by
sex, race, age, diet and even hair colour (brunettes were said to
smell pungent and blondes musky) by the scientists of the period.129
It was the odours of putridity, however, which captured most of
the scientific interest directed towards smell, as Alain Corbin has

From the Middle Ages to modernity 89
amply documented in his book on the perception of smell in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. This was due to the
general belief in stench as a major source of disease. Certain
scholars thus devoted themselves to studying the odours of street
filth; others investigated the scents exhaled by prison or hospital
walls; still others, the odours produced by the decomposition of
corpses or excrement. Dedicated physicians and chemists,
surveying the stenches of polluted rivers, produced descriptions
of fetidity which rival the olfactory poetics of Ben Jonson’s ‘The
Famous Voyage’, but within the context of a scientific enquiry.130
All this came to an end in the late eighteen hundreds. Aromatics
had already been dismissed by science as serving only to mask,
not transform, foul odours. Now, Pasteur’s discovery that most
familiar diseases are caused by germs led scientists to conclude
that foul odours themselves were not agents of illness, but merely
rather unimportant byproducts. The medical community left
smells behind and moved on to microbes. In the scientific
paradigm of the universe, odours had become inessential.

Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell

Finally, I am starting to think about using MaxMsp: because firstly it is not very handy, and secondly it would be creative if I made sounds myself, also the projects I make in Maxmsp I can use them further in Ableton live. I have done five max patches at the moment, I need to do 7 extra mores in the future:)

The first one: A tryout on the noisy pitch (using random midis)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sivzq0fmgssoqa0/1.anxious.wav?dl=0

Study of Phasor & Groove

Deep study on gen~ coding

Study on FM and analog synth//fft and noises~

Source-filter convolution (see also “cross-dog”) is a fun tool for generating interesting sounds, but it can also be used for more conventional purposes, like transforming an existing rhythm track.