Skip to content

The Dawns Here are Quiet

  • Art

2023

Teamwork: Yue Zhu, Xiaotong Qiu
Advisor: prof. Xiaochen Hu, Tianyi Chen

Award:

Contribution:

  • Led the project, conceptualization, design and implementation including Materializing, Structure Design, Circuit Design (Raspberry Pi), Software development (Unity)

An elegy played tacitly by a piano poet.

Did you heard that?

This is a piano poet’s lonesome dirge, we use the keys and the razor blade as emotional landing point, the darkness and silence of the dawn make people feel the beauty of the poetic tragedy, the fragile paper tape silently records the traces of the knife cuts, cyclic growth, and ultimately rupture.

Structure Design

The device partially disassembles the piano and reassembles it with the aluminum material, the servo controls the eccentric wheel drive structure to make the keys move up and down, the strummer drives the knife to stab at the paper tape, and the paper tape continues to roll and circulate. Based on the OSC protocol, the installation accomplishes the communication between unity and raspberry pi, allowing the viewer to interact with the installation by reading the poem.

User Interface in Unity


We design the UI in the classic style of poetry and translate each bottom on the interface to one of the lyrics of the poem. While reading, you could touch each line to trigger different kinds of melody in various emotions. Here, we translate emotion from key movements to memory recorded.


Testing & Deployment


Chinese CHI 2023