Vo-Lo-Roo – A. Bill Miller, Jeff Herriott, and Nick Hwang

Part of the We Give Our Consent show: Feb 7-26, 2019, UW-Whitewater

Electroacoustic Barn Dance, November 2019

Vo-Lo-Roo is a two-part interactive installation and voice-controlled video game.

The video game portion is a side-scrolling voice-controlled shooter, where the player makes voice sounds into a microphone to change the avatar’s vertical position — a change in frequency changes that position. The player makes a fricative sound to shoot projectiles which destroy incoming barriers.

The installation portion uses recordings of the player’s voice sounds, manipulated. Audio is played through three speaker blocks that are aware of their rotation. Rotation about the front-back axis changes the manipulation of the player’s voice recordings. Each speaker block’s rotation affects the manipulated sound and affects gameplay on the video game portion: avatar movement speed, speed of barriers, spawn rate of barriers, camera rotation, and more) — one rotation combination plays the voice recording but also makes gameplay parameters ‘very difficult’.