Byungkyu Lee

School of Music – BFA3 Music Technology

Collaborators: Pablo de Larrañaga Aramoni (BFA3 in XDP) – Scenic Designer

Anthesizer, ‘Ant’ + ‘Synthesizer’, is a tool to sonify ant colonies by applying their social behaviors into sound synthesis in real time. Anthesizer: SPINE focuses on how harvester ants transport, store, and distribute foods and nutrients. Since seeds are their major diet, they are known to collect various types of seeds. They put the seeds in the sorting chamber, and then bring them to the storage chamber located deep inside of their nest. This interesting cycle of logistics takes place in small modular nests connected in series like a freight train. This layout also resembles the shape of our spine which is the major column that supports our body, just like how logistics does in both ants and humans’ society. Piezo mics are built inside of each nest so that they can pick up the audio signals created by ants. These signals then go through amplifier circuits and fed into a sound synthesis software, MaxMSP.