'This is not Here - the Glasgow Effect' was a speculative theatre set proposal by Sonya Smullen. The idea was to "create a site specific activist performance on the M8 Motorway in Glasgow.".
Sonya asked me to create a soundscape for the speculative piece. In order to echo the ideology of her piece I wanted to create something that was conceptually interesting and speculative in its own right.
I decided I wanted to make the motorway play the music for me. To do this I started by filming the motorway and cropped little sections of each lane. These cropped sections of video were fed into MaxMSP devices that I created. When cars passed through the cropped sections of each lane, MaxMSP would calculate the motion using a technique called frame-differencing. Using the output numbers (simply put is recording the amount of pixel changes in one frame to the next, which is output as a number), I triggered midi notes and sent them to Ableton where the midi-notes would play synthesizers.
