Nikhil Singh

A few (mostly older) artistic projects I've been involved in.

HUMANS

(2023)

A collage of voices, streamed from the International Space Station.

Traveling Microphones

(2020)

Explore a sound concept (e.g. "guitar" or "water") as it has been heard around the world.

Sifting Sound

(2020)

My master's thesis work, focused on building a platform for musical experimentation with large-scale audio collections.

Comusica

(2020)

A project for MIT's virtual commencement, collaborating with Eran Egozy and Evan Ziporyn (Music), Ike Chuang (EECS), and others, to bring the graduating class together virtually through musical participation.

The AudioObservatory

(2019)

A 3D environment for exploring a large quantity of audio samples (e.g. 1000s) embedded using an adaptive similarity function, and with a simple mechanism for learning transition probabilities to support trajectory-based interaction.

Compiler Poetry

(2019)

Generating poetic compiler messages with a (character level) language model. Done as one project

For instance:

The water cannot have a near class from the parameters
The land feature to the same type the walks

Scream

(2018)

Using the face to control a chorus of emotional speech recordings (from the well-known RAVDESS dataset).

ObjectSounds

(2018)

Object detection as an interface to sound exploration. Uses visually detected object names to search Freesound.org and retrieve related sounds recorded by other users, anchoring a soundscape composition in the user's present physical environment.

NYC Sounds

(2018)

An interface for sounds from Manhattan (retrieved via Freesound). The interface is based on a dataset of street lengths, obtained from the Senseable City lab at MIT DUSP (see letter).

Kronospaces

(2018)

An audiovisual interface to explore the Kronos Quartet's recorded catalog (+ exploratory recordings they made at the MIT Media Lab in 2018), using feature-based K-means clustering and corpus-based concatenative synthesis.

A Rose Out of Concrete

(2018)

A multidiscplinary dance project by Nona Hendryx, Hank Shocklee, Duane Lee Holland Jr., and Dr. Richard Boulanger. I worked on various aspects of the show's technology, co-leading a team of students.

Twitter Ensemble

(2017)

Turning tweets about music into music using a simple algorithm.

The Sound of Dreaming

(2017)

A musical-technological-theatrical production. I wrote/produced music, starred, performed, and built technology. Performances: Moogfest (Durham, NC 05/17) + Mass MoCA in Nick Cave's Until (North Adams, MA 08/17).

MusicianKit

(2017)

A simple Swift API for musical composition, investigation, and more. Provides tools to construct and work with musical ideas, and to gather information about the ways in which musical iOS apps are used by musicians.

csPerformer

(2017)

One of my undergraduate final projects. An application for composing through using performative gestures. Above is an etude composed with the system.

BMV Kidzapalooza

(2017)

An installation for Kidzapalooza (at Lolapalooza Chicago 2017, with Blake Adelman). A generative music system with lightning and automatic multi-angle video to simulate festival performance experiences for children.