The idea behind the production of this piece came very randomly, but also naturally. During our research, while having a little break we were jamming with a chord and an acid sound and all of a sudden the idea popped up to create a piece of music where the TB-303 is being triggered and played by the dancer. As Acid music fanatics, we always wondered how magical the sequencer of the original TB-303 is, but what if that sequencer was actually a human being and their body movements?
To create this human sequencer, first we selected a scale of notes which were programmed to be triggered at different angles, different speeds and at various rotations. These notes were then fed to the ABL audio realism VST plugin. Music generation tools like this make music more fun but also more intuitive to produce, and this led us to our next challenge, to not only create a human acid generator tool but also make it work in sync with other devices that other band members are using.
The most amazing aspect of this performance was when the two different forms of art ‘Sound and Visual’ came together through the dancer. Imagine having the ability to not only shape, trigger, modulate and play music in real time but also having the control to trigger visual scenes and manipulate image orientation.
From a visuals’ perspective, having 270 degrees of screen permitted playing around with some immersive visuals. Here we created a low-poly wireframe of a sphere that rotated around the audience. The rotation on the y-axis turned around the audience in-sync with the tempo of the song, while the rotation around the other two axes were controlled by the movement of Cheryl’s hand gestures (gyroscope).
The acid melody was represented by green acid drops (obviously!). These are being generated with the same triggers that are launching the acid musical notes, and are displayed in random positions around all screens.
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