When I was thinking about what to wekinate, I had a plethora of ideas of where I wanted to go, from visual art to rhythm, but I ended up drawing inspiration from my fascination for one man bands – Street performers that played multiple instruments or tools at the same time. And so for my three activities, I decided that I would use 3 different inputs that when used in conjunction, mimics an entire band.
For the first activity, my initial idea was to have colors that represent different notes such that it would be my interpretation of someone with synesthesia. I then expanded this idea to be thee first musical element of my one man band. Different colors represent different melodies and so My thought was you would control the colors of the background as you perform to create an audio visual experience. As a proof on concept for this part, I made tested out between printed color paper, screen mirroring and using an alternate screen and somehow the use of my iPad as an alternate screen worked best. I then got a bunch of my friends to try it out and make slideshows of colors to make their own melodies. Here is a demo of me playing happy birthday using colors:
For my second activity, I needed some sort of percussion/rhythm and didn’t know what exactly I wanted to use to control it so I chose FaceOSC and mapped the intensity and complexity of the drums to my facial expression where the more into the beat I was, the drums would get more complicated. My initial plan was to have FaceOSC trigger Ableton Live tracks however I couldn’t get my hands on Ableton for free nor did I have a friend with Ableton on their computer system. Here’s a demo of that aspect:
And finally for my third activity, I needed some chords to fill the soundscape and realistically the only limb I had left to clearly articulate without messing with the previous systems was my hands. So I used HandPoseOSC and a Logic Pro X OSC to unmute and mute tracks based on what fingers I had up on my hand. This allowed to me to control instrumentation in a way similar to Jacob Collier’s live audience choir without an actual audience. This was a favorite amongst my friends and roomate as they felt like they didn’t need indepth music knowledge to make it sound good and have fun. Here’s a demo of this activity:
To conclude, I would love to “Play” my instruments on a stage with a massive TV behind me for the colored backgrounds. Working around limitations and making the most of the medium was fun and I learned a lot through this project.