MDes Sound for the Moving Image School of Innovation & Technology
Jack Lev Braun
Jack Lev Braun is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sound, audiovisual installations, and poetry. Born and raised in New York City, she majored in English/creative writing and minored in studio art at Kenyon College before studying at the Glasgow School of Art. Through a practice strongly grounded in research, Jack often focuses on the intersections & interactions between gender theory, ecological theory, and analog synthesis & music technology. Artists and theorists she looks to for inspiration include Stacy Alaimo, Alvin Lucier, Wendy Carlos, José Esteban Muñoz, Eva Hayward, jellyfish, and horseshoe crabs.
Crescent Moon Shield of the Dawn
Crescent Moon Shield of the Dawn (a literal translation of “Lunataspis aurora,” the oldest known horseshoe crab) is a long-form, process-oriented sonification piece and sound installation inspired by medical transition, bradytelic evolution, trans-ecology, and non-linear temporalities. Using TouchDesigner, I mapped the levels of estrogen, testosterone, and hemoglobin in my blood as measured by frequent blood tests – as well as the current moon phase – onto specified parameters of a Korg Minilogue XD, creating a soundscape that evolves concurrently to my bloodwork in 1:1 time. The earliest included blood test was taken on December 15th, 2022, and the most recent was done on April 18th, 2025, making the full piece 856 days in length with the possibility of growing as I continue to get bloodwork done, challenging the durational limits of installations and encouraging viewers to embrace slow-acting change. (Between those two dates, my blood was tested 6 times; I used linear extrapolation to calculate the average rate of change per day between each test.) Through data sonification, the flow of a bloodstream and its subtle changes are reified and made palpable; while I designed the base program on the Korg Minilogue XD, I had to cede control over the parameters to the data, in a way giving my blood a kind of autonomy over its voice.
In exploring a trans-species relationship with horseshoe crabs, I considered how the exogenous hormones I inject are reliant on the blood of horseshoe crabs for biomedical testing, leaving our lives entangled and revealing how “[a]nimal experimentation and instrumentalization are enmeshed in the genealogies of becoming transsexual” (Hayward 2010). At the same time, those exogenous hormones are the reason I myself am bled often for scientific testing to ensure my blood levels fall within an expected range, creating a delicate web of interconnectedness and trans-corporeal becomings.
Just as the modern horseshoe crab is a product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution changing just enough to only be noticed generations down the line, this project reveals the ways I, too, am changing every day, slowly but surely.
Please email me if you’d like to read more about this project or learn more about the TouchDesigner patch I created for it.
DigiTouch
DigiTouch is a TouchDesigner patch that uses the MediaPipe plugin to create a dialogue between the Digitech Vocalist VHM5 (which was discontinued in the 90s) and TouchDesigner. It was programmed with the goal of merging old tech with new, and using defunct music technology in ways it was never intended to be used.
The user’s pinch distance is remapped onto the Digitech Vocalist’s specific MIDI settings so that the Vocalist can be controlled by user movement. The patch can be reconfigured to accept other MediaPipe metrics as inputs instead, including finger, hand, face, and pose tracking. DigiTouch also has the option to ‘key-lock’ and only ‘play’ the notes that are in a key of the user’s choosing (as seen in the below video). At the moment, it’s only mapped out all major scales (and, technically, their relative minors), but could be expanded it to include other modes.
DigiTouch acts in conversation with the vocoder’s ability to trouble “how we constitute ‘the human body’ at any given time” due to its muddling of human and non-human sounds, challenging notions of authenticity in music (Dickinson 2001). Related to a deep history of (trans)gendered electronic noise and mapped out onto the presently-political medium of my body, the possibilities of the DigiTouch resonate into the future; more a possible groundwork or tool to use for future projects than a completed work itself, the DigiTouch program marked my first foray into using TouchDesigner to control MIDI devices using external metrics.
Please email me if you would like a more in-depth look at how the TouchDesigner patch works; more videos of it in action can be found on my Instagram.
KNOW YOUR MEAT
KNOW YOUR MEAT is a 3rd order ambisonic audiovisual VR project about body dysmorphia and dysphoria. The video & audio are sourced from “Know Your Meat,” a 1945 promotional video for the beef industry made by the now-defunct Office of Price Administration, and NASA’s Perseus sonification. As the words warp over the course of the video, the kaleidoscopic images of the meat continue to shift and split into fractals around the viewer, creating a macabre Rorschach test. Use headphones for optimal viewing experience.
Atrophy
Atrophy is an installation piece built from hours of home video footage my grandfather filmed and edited throughout my childhood and 250 audio clips of his voice recorded shortly before he passed away. A random audio clip is triggered every 7 seconds and a new video clip is played every 5 seconds, creating new meanings and patterns in their unbalanced overlap. Over the course of the installation, both the audio and video quality degrade – slowly at first, and then more rapidly – mimicking a degenerative disease. A generative supercut, Atrophy never repeats in the same way; every time the degradation restarts its cycle, a new piece is produced.
[The ‘degradation time’ of this version of the piece is ~40 minutes; the end of the video shows the beginning of a new ‘cycle.’]
