I composed a simultaneous, secondary melody that plays in silence.

I mapped the vertical displacement of a cloth to the volume of the secondary melody using a tanh function, ensuring that a maximal displacement wouldn't force the audio to clip.

This mapping allows me to not only "play" the cloth (and thus the melody) but also allows the cloth's post-displacement oscillations to drive the melody's presence, providing a material physicality to the creation of sound.

Other parameters mapped to other cloths' displacements included a low-pass filter on the overall audio, and the volume and low-pass filter of a noise track.

The bed of tines was a reaction to a previous iteration of this project where I triggered a music sample upon collision with an object. This binary interaction's lack of dynamism was unsatisfying.

In response I replicated out a thin rectangular prism bound to its base by a spring allowing mildly elastic motion in multiple directions. Collectively these tines move in a greater fluid whole, even though each's movement is relatively simple.

I randomly applied a music sample from a set of eleven to each tine, and to reduce the total number of samples triggered when passing my hand through the mass of tines, I set the probability of triggering a sample upon collision to be much less than one.

I noticed that my brain confabulates subtle tactile sensation on my hands when I interact with this stack of cloths.

Something about the visual feedback and the physical dynamics strongly evokes the qualities of cobwebs, and multiple participants have experienced the illusion of texture where there is none.