first off, i would like a massive credit to eric astle, anna mead, poppy clausen and cheyne yuan. what we made in such little time was honestly mind blowing.

we were told to pick a random item from a pile of stuff… we grabbed a bag and inside were two light up speakers that could float on water. straight away we wanted the project to link to water somehow. when we looked at the parts inside the speakers, they looked quite life like, almost biological, which led us to the idea of turning them into creatures.

while we were talking it through, i was playing around with the speakers. i realised if i split the left and right stereo, i could make the two speakers talk to each other. anna and poppy then put them inside bin bags, which made them look more like jellyfish, so we took them to a spare room to experiment.

we all liked how the stereo changed as we moved the speakers around the room. so i panned two audio files left and right so the jellyfish were calling out to each other, and the group agreed we should build the whole idea around these two jellyfish being in love. we didn’t have another meeting after that, but everyone quickly worked out what they were in charge of. which was handy, because it was halloween week and everyone was busy.

eric and i live together, so we sat down and worked out how to connect his visuals with the audio. i made a simple two track system, one voice for each jellyfish, each built from three sine wave oscillators, so the sound moved like water. that turned into a chat about jellyfish and emotions that went something like this:

me: so if you think about it, they can only move, but their ripples push the other one about, so to swim straight they need to adjust to each other?

eric: they learn to live with each other?

me: yeah, which is actually really romantic when you think about it.

i then drew some squiggles on paper to show how the jellyfish could move in his drawings. i think he knew what i meant, he just wanted to watch me scribble.

that idea stuck with both of us. jellyfish don’t really have a way of talking to each other, they can’t see properly and they can’t make sounds. all they can do is move. but every time one of them moves, it sends ripples through the water, and those ripples push the other one about. so if two jellyfish want to stay close, they have to keep adjusting to each other. one moves, the other feels it and shifts, and that shift gets felt back. in a way, the water is the conversation.

we started thinking that’s basically what being in love is. not big dramatic gestures, just two people constantly reacting to each other, giving a bit of space here, moving a bit closer there, until they’re going in the same direction. neither of them is in charge. they just learn each other’s rhythm.

that ended up shaping the sound too. the sine waves in each jellyfish’s voice rise and fall like ripples, and because each one sits on its own side of the stereo, you can hear one call and the other respond. when the speakers move around the room, the sound moves with them, so the audience is kind of sat in the water, feeling the ripples pass between the two of them. and when they finally meet in the middle and collapse together, it’s because they don’t need to adjust anymore. they’ve found the same rhythm.

on the day, anna and poppy had made two great bin bag coverings for the speakers. i hooked my laptop up and they already knew the movements they needed to do. cheyne and eric’s drawings came together as a comic, telling the story of the two jellyfish getting separated, calling out to find each other, then coming back together.

for the presentation everyone sat in a circle. anna and poppy moved the speakers around on sticks from opposite sides of the room, so you could hear the two of them calling out to each other as they moved. at the end, the jellyfish collapsed together in the middle.

overall, a 10/10 experience.