These 3D models were originally made for use within a Cycling'74 Max/MSP project. The project was for my INTERACTIVE SOUND ENVIRONMENTS module, during my 3rd year studying Sound & Music Production.
THE CHESS-PLAYER
The Max patch was called 'The Chess-Player', and was an attempt to create original musical compositions from data taken from games of chess. I created a demo version of the patch, which worked okay - then aimed really high with the second version; hense the 3D chess pieces, which were used in a really cool 3D user interface (using a Behringer BCF2000 to control the pieces, and a camera that could swoop around the board!!
The full version was going pretty well, and was creating music, and looking really really nice!! ...but there were a few reasons why I shelved it for a different idea:
1. The patch got HUGE - it was made up of about 7 independant, LARGE patches, incorporating 100's of sub-patches
2. The slow dynamics of a game of chess are never going to be great dynamics for a piece of music
3. Who wants a piece of music giving away all their devious moves!?!?!?!?
NEW PROJECT
I ended up making a really cool syneasthetic instrument - incorporating realtime audio and visual synthesis using a form of cellular automata; the patch is called The ADDER-PAD, and is worth a look if you're into Max, or just interested in merging sound and vision, and techniques of audio/visual synthesis. I will hopefully put a page of two about it on my site real soon.