CBL — Creative Bowl Lab

A live installation built around a Tibetan singing bowl. A person stands in front of a webcam; the bowl's sound physically alters their heartbeat (read by an Arduino pulse sensor), and TouchDesigner renders a living-art installation around them — a body aura that pulses with each heartbeat (colour encodes BPM), flowing colour, a cymatics / Chladni interference figure shaped by the bowl's pitch, aurora ribbons, and chakra colour drawn from the bowl frequency (396–963 Hz Solfeggio scale).

TU/e Multi-Disciplinary CBL course, Group 5, Year 2 Q4 2025–2026. Final presentation: 19 June 2026.

The whole show runs standalone on one laptop + one webcam — no browser.

What it looks like

More frames: cymatics · aurora · p_render.

Repo structure

.
├── td/                     # ★ THE INSTALLATION — TouchDesigner network cbl.toe
│                           #   + its Python / GLSL / bundled MediaPipe models. This is the demo.
│                           #   Paths are hardcoded to C:/projects/CBL/td, so td/ never moves.
├── docs/                   # Current, authoritative docs
│   ├── index.md            #   doc index
│   ├── td-screenshots/     #   installation screenshots
│   ├── teammate-handoff/   #   teammate package
│   └── archive/            #   superseded specs / old plans / meeting notes
├── legacy/web/             # DORMANT secondary React/Vite web app — reversible fallback, NOT the demo
├── presentation/           # Final-presentation deck
├── EngineeringArt CBL/     # Teammate MATLAB / CSV source contributions
├── README.md
├── CLAUDE.md
└── RUN.md

Run it

On a machine with TouchDesigner installed and the webcam connected:

& "C:\Program Files\Derivative\TouchDesigner\bin\TouchDesigner.exe" "C:\projects\CBL\td\cbl.toe"

Stand in front of the webcam — no browser. TouchDesigner does the camera, body/hand tracking, particles, aura, cymatics, aurora, and chakra audio on the GPU, from a single laptop.

Full run + tuning instructions (bowl-mic / heartbeat enable steps, tuning knobs): see RUN.md.

Docs

• docs/index.md — the documentation index.
• docs/touchdesigner-onesurface-2026-05-27.md — START HERE. The authoritative standalone architecture.

Note

legacy/web/ is a dormant React/Vite web app kept only as a reversible fallback dev tool. It is not launched at the demo, and the installation does not depend on it.