"OSCILLA – Scalable Interactive Audiovisual installation"

Year: 2009–2015

Concept, design and development: Andrea Santini.
Additional programming: Stefano Piermatteo, Andrea Fincato.
Production: UBIKteatro.
Sponsors: Philips; Sonus Faber.

OSCILLA is an interactive audiovisual installation exploring harmonic structures through movement, sound and real‑time visualisation. Within a scalable projected interface, the positions and movements of people or of physical objects placed on the surface are optically tracked and used to control the volume and pitch of a set of sine‑wave oscillators.

By manipulating these tangible elements in the projection area, participants generate evolving chords, microtonal intervals and beat frequencies, while Lissajous‑based visualisations reveal the underlying relations between frequencies and harmonic ratios. The work operates as a phygital instrument, in which embodied interaction with objects in space is tightly coupled with spatialised sound diffusion: the oscillators can be mapped to different loudspeaker configurations, turning harmonic exploration into an explicitly spatial listening experience.

While rooted in my earlier practice, OSCILLA remains an important project in my trajectory because it brings together several concerns that continue in my current work, including interactive sound systems, spatial audio, embodied listening and the design of environments where acoustic structures can be navigated through physical action.

International circulation / selected appearances:

• Tokyo Experimental Festival Vol.8 – TEF Sound Installation, Tokyo Arts and Space, Tokyo, 2013.

• Music Tech Fest Paris, IRCAM / Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2014.

• MTF Central – The Music of Science, Ljubljana, 2015.

• Kinetica / GRAVITY, London, 2015.

• NYX – Sogni di una notte digitale, Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza, 2015.

Selected links:

• UBIKteatro project page

• NYX exhibition page

• Tokyo Wonder Site 

• Video: #MTFParis Andrea Santini – Oscilla

• Video: OSCILLA – Tokyo Experimental Festival 2013

Publications: 

• AA.VV. (2013). This Thisage This age. Catalogue, ApusA – Centro Espositivo Sloveno, Venezia, pp. 120–132.

• Santini, A. (2014). OSCILLA, a scalable interactive audiovisual environment. In F. Murano (ed.), Light Works. Experimental Projection Mapping, Aracne, Italy, pp. 102–103.

• Santini, A. (2013). OSCILLA – Scalable Interactive Audiovisual Environment. In AA.VV., SAE Alumni Magazine, Issue 02/2013, pp. 106–113

• Tognon, P. (2012). La classe dell’arte. Silvana Editoriale, Milano, pp. 99–108.

• Tokyo Wonder Site. (2014). Emerging Artist Report. Exhibition catalogue, Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo, pp. 56–57.

• Kinetica Museum. (2017). The Thin Veil. Exhibition catalogue, Kinetica Museum, London.