The three parts of our project are sound, movement, and sensors.
For the movement of the plants, we send a 30 to 40 Hz sinewave to some base shakers. We attached these shakers to the plants so that they started shaking too.
The sound design we did in Ableton. We sampled the sounds of the plants shaking and added a highly-pitched version over the original. This gave the sound the digital feel we were going for. For “the voice of the tree” we used reverb. The strength of the reverb depends on your distance from the tree.
To detect your distance to the tree we used a distance sensor and a Teensy microcontroller. Ableton recognizes our Teensy as a MIDI device. This way we could get the values of the sensor into Ableton.
