Proxemic Fields is a study by Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch created during his artistic research residency at Ircam. The installation has been presented at the Ircam Forum Workshops in March 2017.
đ A presentation of the residency at a seminar at Ircam (French)
đ An interview on Proxemic Fields at Axones (French)
Our second collaboration with ChloĂ© is an interactive installation that restages her EP The Dawn as an interactive experience using smartphones. The players collectively create their own mix of ChloĂ©’s composition as a function of their proximity and motion exploring musical and personal affinities.
Listening with headphones, each player embodies a single track of the mix controlled through the device’s inclination. Approaching one another, the sounds blend to a commun mix in the playerâs earphones. Wandering about, each player’s mix evolves according to a unique trajectory through the encounters and interactions with others.
The installation has been shown at the opening of the Vertigo project and the Forum Workshops at Ircam in March 2017. It uses the same technology as the ProXoMix experience relying on Bluetooth beaconing to estimate the approximate distance between the participants.
đ ChloĂ© â The Dawn (Original Mix)
Your Smartest Choice is a performance for four musicians, electronics, and an audience with smartphones by Huihui Cheng. The performance was given at the Eclat festival in Stuttgart on February 5, 2017 with members of the 2e2m ensemble.
During the performance, the audience plays games â involving colored balloons â on their smartphones using a web application using a local Wi-Fi network. The games, as well the sounds they produce through the smartphone speakers, follow the participants’ orientation towards the musicians and change with the different parts of the composition. Some of the sounds appearing on the smartphones are controlled by an additional pianist interpreting a part of the score. The result of the game performance of all participants (i.e. the number of points associated to the balloons of different colors and to the four instruments) seem to determine the end of the performance.
ProXoMix is the prototype of an interactive installation where participants equipped with mobile devices remix a piece composed of complementary loops by moving in an empty space. Up to 24 participants embody and control each one track rendered over earphones. A lowpass filter allow them to modulate the timbre and presence of the looped track by tilting the mobile device. When two or more participants (i.e. their mobile devices) come closer to each other, their tracks and its modulation appears in each other’s earphones.
The installation allows for collaboratively performing mixes of the tracks creating social-musical assemblies and spontaneous choreographies. The mobile application uses Bluetooth beaconing to estimate the distance between the mobile devices.
The originality of the installation lies in the entanglement of social and musical affordances as well as in the collaborative embodiment of the notion of (re)-mixing it creates. In the installation, space becomes an interface. But other than in geolocated sound applications, the space in ProXoMix is not predefined. It is structured by â and actually unfolds through â the spatial relationships (i.e. distance and relative orientation) between the participants.
A first version of the has been shown during the CoSiMa workshop at the ESBA Le Mans in September 2017.
88 Fingers is a concert performance in which up to 88 participants in the audience perform on an automatized piano (i.e. a YAMAHA Disklavier) via their mobile devices. The piano is presented in the performance space as if it would be the instrument of a solo performer (e.g. on stage or in the center of a gallery space). Apart from the web-based system that allows the players to select a single key of the piano and to play it during the concert the concept of the performance does not impose any further constraints.
The performance establishes a metaphor of a free and responsible society.
At the beginning of the performance, the participants are asked to connect their mobile devices to a local Wi-Fi net- work and visit a web page using a web browser. When entering the web page, the participants are prompted to select a single key they will control during performance among the remaining available keys (see below on the left). When 88 players have selected a key, further connections will be refused. The players who successfully claimed a key, enter the performance interface shown below on the right.
The interface allows for triggering the selected key â shown in the bottom left â by touching the screen. The key is triggered without perceivable latency when the player places a finger on the screen and is released when the finger is removed. The initial vertical touch position determines the velocity.
A first 10-minute performance of 88 Fingers has been given at an cultural event of the JEP-TALN-RECITAL conference on speech processing in the concert hall of the Centre Pompidou in July 2016. The 88 participants where among an audience of about 250 people.
Ă l’occasion de l’ouverture de la 36e Ă©dition du festival Montpellier Danse, EnsadLab, idscenes et le festival vous conviait Ă faire lâexpĂ©rience dâun dispositif interactif collectif et immersif inĂ©dit les jeudi 23 juin de 13h Ă 17h, vendredi 24 et samedi 25 juin de 11h Ă 17h, salle BĂ©jart Agora (18 Rue Sainte-Ursule, Montpellier).
Montpellier Danse a accueilli, dans la salle BĂ©jart de lâAgora, lâĂ©vĂ©nement Collective Mobile Mapping Montpellier, rĂ©unissant les Ćuvres de Dominique Cunin et Christophe Domino sous forme de sessions alternĂ©es et complĂ©mentaires. Espace Puissance Espace, de Dominique Cunin, trouve son origine dans la projection immersive du modĂšle 3D dâun espace architectural sur lui-mĂȘme.
Les spectateurs sont invitĂ©s Ă contrĂŽler collectivement cette grande image Ă lâaide de leurs smartphones.
Les murs bougent, on entre dans lâĂ©paisseur et lâintimitĂ© du bĂątiment. Centon Digital est un jeu de sens et de lecture, oĂč le joueur sĂ©lectionne des mots ou des sĂ©quences de mots qui sâadditionnent pour former un texte projetĂ©. Tous les murs deviennent Ă©cran, la frontalitĂ© dâune projection « classique » disparaĂźt pour laisser la place Ă une immersion du spectateur dans la projection textuelle, Ă une interactivitĂ© entre les joueurs eux-mĂȘmes et avec la Salle BĂ©jart.
Un projet idscĂšnes, organisĂ© par EnsadLab, le laboratoire de lâĂcole nationale supĂ©rieure des Arts DĂ©coratifsâParis, Grande Image Lab, ESBA TALM-Le Mans et avec le concours de lâEsbama Montpellier.
CoSiMa has participated at the Sonar+D international conference on creativity and technology of the Sonar music festival in Barcelone with a Sonar Innovation Challenge. A team of 5 musicians, designers, and developers â formed over a month before the event â has worked two and a half days on a music application dedicated to a public interacting collaboratively through their smartphones. The web-based application has been developed with the Soundworks framework.
The resulting application is Weather, a performance for a DJ and a public participating through their smartphones. As usual in performances based on the Soundworks framework, participants connect their smartphones to the local CoSiMa Wi-Fi network and visit the web page of the Weather application. Once connected to the application, the participants can play with four gestures to switch between different weather states that are associated to different sound textures and visualizations generated on their mobile devices: (1.) Touching the screen generates the bird chirps of a sunny afternoon, (2.) swaying and tilting the device generates wind, (3.) shaking it softly generates a rain sound and rain drops on the screen, and (4.) shaking it harder generates thunder sounds and lightning on screen.
The sound generated by the participants creates a sound textures distributed over the audience. The current weather states of all clients are collected on the server to generate a weather profile that controls visuals on a public display and environmental sounds on the PA. In addition, the weather profile is interpreted by a DJ playing live electronic music in dialog with the audience’s sound textures.
The five CoSiMa SIC challengers who developed the Weather performance are Matthew Bethancourt, Andrés Ferraro, JP Carrascal, Chaithanya Jade, and Yuli Levtov.
CoSiMa participated at the Music Tech Fest in Berlin with a workshop « Hack the Audience » featuring the Soundworks framework. In two days, mai 26 and 27, we developed two performances in which the audience participates with their smartphones : MTF Orgy and GrainField. In both performances, the audience connects their smartphones to the CoSiMa Wi-Fi network and visits a given webpage to participate.
In MTF Orgy, each participant controls the intensity and detuning of two harmonics of a distributed additive synthesizer â the Orgy organ â by tilting their smartphone. The lower harmonics are generated on the PA and the higher ones on the participant’s mobile devices. A musician on stage plays chords on a MIDI keyboard that determine the fundamental frequencies. Other musicians can join the performance. At the MTF performance, we were accompanied by Steve Lawson on the bass.
In GrainField the smartphones enable the participants to play with the granular synthesis of 2 secs of sound recorded from a percussionist sitting in the middle of the audience (see images below). The system records every second 2 secs of sound that are send to the smartphones of the audience so that the sound a participant plays with changes every 8 seconds. The sound generated by the participant’s smartphones can be perceived as a distributed granular echo of the percussionist’s performance without any other amplification.
In addition, we presented the CoSiMa project in a brief talk and performance with the audience playing birds and drops on their smartphones.
CoSiMa is represented in the Electrosound exhibition at the EDF Foundation with two small installations. One documents the participative concert Chloé ⚠Ircam and the other is a downscaled version of Collective Loops.
The installation that refers to the participative concert we created with Chloé, is based on the same technical setup and music track as the Terminal installation and features 14 wall mounted smartphones. As in the concert and the Terminal installation, the public can connect to the installation to participate using their mobile devices.
Collective Loops is shown in a reduced version with eight smartphones mounted on desk and a screen that replaces the floor projection.
The exhibition also included the MO â Musical Objects that have been developed in the framework of one of CoSiMa’s predecessor projects, Interlude.
The participative concert ChloĂ© âš Ircam and the interactive installation Terminal, both created in the framework of CoSiMa, have been presented in the documentary « Le Future de la Musique » on the television program PLANĂTE+. The documentary includes interviews with ChloĂ© and Norbert Schnell as well as footage from a working session with ChloĂ© and Ircam’s CoSiMa team in a studio at Ircam.
Here is the trailer of the episode that features the CoSiMa projects :
