vi · lélegzetvétel — breath room

biofeedback · the involuntary — the game you do not play

There is nothing to do. A room whose reverberation is your exhale and whose drone drifts with your rate. Breathe slowly and it opens; hurry and it closes in. No goal is stated, no progress is shown, and the piece never ends on its own — you leave when you leave. Around six breaths a minute the room reaches its widest, which is also, not coincidentally, where respiratory sinus arrhythmia peaks.

B1 lélegzetvétel breath room web audio — starts when you open the room

The room is shut. Open it with the microphone and it will listen to you breathe — or without one, and mark each exhale yourself.

rate over the session — top of the strip is 24 a minute, foot of it 2the band is 5–7, where the room is widest

what the instrument recorded

The microphone, precisely. If you allow it, the page takes the microphone stream, band-passes it around 700 Hz where the noise of a breath sits, and follows the envelope. Nothing is recorded, nothing is stored, nothing is sent anywhere, and no part of the stream is ever routed to the output — only the envelope is read, frame by frame, and thrown away. Close the room, or close the tab, and the stream stops. Use headphones anyway: on speakers the room will hear itself and start breathing along with the drone rather than with you.

What this strand does not claim. No cognitive enhancement. No focus score. No emotional state inferred, and nothing reported back to anybody. The credibility of biofeedback art is repeatedly damaged by works that quietly imply clinical benefit — the commercial brain-training sector has already been through this, from the Owen transfer study in Nature in 2010 to the American FTC’s 2016 action over Lumosity’s advertising. This is a demonstration of physiology made audible, and it says so. The one claim it does make is falsifiable and is on the panel: whether the room measurably slows the breather over a session.

Végül az akarat által nem irányított biológiai jelek alapú reaktív rendszereket is vizsgáljuk. A hasznosítható jelek különböző mérési és követési rendszerekből azonnali feldolgozásra kerülnek és hangbéli változásokat váltanak ki. Eme passzívnak mondható játékok kikerülik a figyelemtartás szükségességét, ezáltal nyugtatóbb hatásuk van és az elvonatkoztatott tudatállapotokon belüli fejleszthető irányvonalakat tárják fel. A mozgás és szemkövetésen túl a bőr elektromos ellenállását, lélegzetvétel és szívtempó, sőt alapvető agyi hullámokat is tudjuk hasznosítani.

Finally we also examine reactive systems based on biological signals not governed by the will. Usable signals from various measurement and tracking systems are processed immediately and trigger changes in sound. These games — which may be called passive — sidestep the need to sustain attention; they therefore have a more calming effect, and open up developable directions within abstracted states of consciousness. Beyond movement and eye tracking, we can make use of the skin’s electrical resistance, breathing and heart rate, and even basic brain waves.

source note, 25 October 2017 — paragraph 7

what this strand isolates

Everything the other five exclude. Here the player has no task, and in the strictest pieces no button. The source’s own phrase for what these games do is the best description available: they sidestep the need to sustain attention. Every other game ever made is an attention tax. This strand is the one that is not.

The engineering fact that governs it is simple and unforgiving. A button answers in a millisecond; a sweat gland answers in one to five seconds; heart-rate variability needs half a minute. There is no tight interaction loop to be had, and pretending otherwise produces the worst kind of biofeedback art — a machine that appears to respond to you and is in fact responding to noise. The correct response is not to fight the latency but to compose at the body’s tempo. These pieces are slow because the body is slow, and their slowness is honest.

What each signal can and cannot be composed for. The right-hand column is the whole design brief of the strand.
signal	sensor	rate	earliest usable answer	design consequence
button	mechanical switch, debounced	—	~1 ms	instrumental — everything is possible
movement	IMU, 6-axis	200 Hz	5–20 ms	gestural, and still feels caused
gaze	eye tracker	60–120 Hz	10–30 ms	fast, but bounded by saccade physiology
muscle	surface EMG	1 kHz	20–50 ms	precedes movement — usable as intention
breath	chest belt or thermistor	25 Hz	0.2–1 s	phase is playable; rate is a slow envelope
heart rate	PPG or ECG	100 Hz+	0.3–1 s	beat level only; HRV needs 30–300 s
skin conductance	EDA electrodes	32 Hz	1–5 s	no causal feel is possible — compose it as weather
cortical rhythm	dry EEG, 4–8 channels	250 Hz	0.5–2 s	band power only, and noisy. Claim nothing more

Breath is the one row of that table a laptop can honestly reach, which is why this is the piece that is built here. The installed version uses a respiration belt or a chest IMU and needs one sensor and no instructions; it works on someone who is asleep. It is also the strand’s most immediately deployable piece — a waiting room, a hospital corridor, a school’s quiet space.

the rest of the strand

B2 Bőrsuttogás · Skin Whisper
EDA electrodes on two fingers, and a quiet piece interrupted only by your own skin. Each phasic skin-conductance response — arriving one to five seconds after whatever caused it — blooms slowly into the mix. The stated game is to not respond. It cannot be won, and losing is the content. In the paired version your skin plays the other person’s room and theirs plays yours. Its ancestor is exact and worth naming: Erkki Kurenniemi’s DIMI-S of 1971, which turned the skin conductance between two touching people into sound. The lateness of the signal, a defect in any other strand, is here the entire dramatic device — you hear the reaction to a thing you have already stopped thinking about. measures — tonic level and phasic response rate · habituation slope · in the paired version, physiological coupling between two people who cannot see each other
B3 Alfa-kapu · Alpha Gate
Dry consumer EEG, occipital placement, ten minutes. Close your eyes and a slow harmonic gate opens. Open them and it closes. That is the whole piece. It is the oldest and most reliable effect in electroencephalography — Hans Berger observed alpha rise on eye closure in the 1920s — and the piece announces that rather than dressing it up as mind control. Its lineage is Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (1965), where amplified alpha waves shook percussion instruments across a stage. Being unfashionably honest about what is being measured is, in this genre, the artistic position. measures — occipital alpha index, 8–12 Hz band power, eyes open against eyes closed · signal quality and electrode contact, logged honestly · nothing else
B4 Szemvonal · Gaze Line
An eye tracker or a head-mounted IMU, and no hands required at any point. An instrument whose notes are placed around the player in the sound field and selected by looking, with dwell-to-sound. It is not a game with a task; it is the strand’s bridge back to the articulation strand — an expressive instrument for a player with no voluntary hand movement, running the same engine as the Instrument Smith, deliberately the same voice, so that two players using different bodies are audibly playing the same instrument. It is where this project’s ethics and its craft meet: the source lists eye tracking almost in passing, and taken seriously it is the difference between a suite of games about the body and a suite of games that some bodies cannot play. measures — selection accuracy and dwell time · expressive range against the button version · fatigue over a session

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