Dance and timbral exploration (DATE)
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Dance and timbral exploration (DATE)
Bob Pritchard (University of British Columbia) [PI].
Description:
Timbral exploration of sonic resources is often carried out by musicians interacting in a particular environment, often involving improvisation or the execution of compositionally directed sonic gestures. The Dance And Timbral Exploration (DATE) project will expand on the combined composed and improvisatory environments by providing a dancer/choreographer with the tools to blend and process the sounds of two musicians in real time using physical gestures. This project will make use of the Kinect Controlled Artistic Sensing System (KiCASS), a UBC-developed motion capture system which uses infra-red tracking to generate data from 20 points on multiple dancers. KiCASS has been used in dozens of student and faculty performances involving multiple musicians and dancers, with both local and web-based connections. The DATE data will be used to control custom-written software to process the mixing, processing, and diffusion of the musicians’ sounds, making use of the on-stage location of a dancer as well as through tracked dance gestures. Additionally, it will be possible to use the KiCASS data to control the generation of video that maps gesture and location to specific video traces. In this way an association will be created between the dancer’s motion and physical space on stage, and specific timbres and timbral processes, reinforced with visual traces and colour. One expectation arising from this project is that the use of physical, artistic gestures for generating sound modifications in performance will result in sonic gestures and timbre mixing that might not occur with other performance and control methods.