My PhD student Cagri Erdem developed a performance together with dancer Katja Henriksen Schia. The piece was first performed together with Qichao Lan and myself during the RITMO opening and also during MusicLab vol. 3. See here for a teaser of the performance:
This week Cagri, Katja and myself performed a version of the piece Vrengt at NIME in Porto Alegre.
We also presented a paper describing the development of the instrument/piece:
Erdem, Cagri, Katja Henriksen Schia, and Alexander Refsum Jensenius. “Vrengt: A Shared Body-Machine Instrument for Music-Dance Performance.” In Proceedings of the International C Onference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Porto Alegre, 2019.
Abstract:
This paper describes the process of developing a shared instrument for music–dance performance, with a particular focus on exploring the boundaries between standstill vs motion, and silence vs sound. The piece Vrengt grew from the idea of enabling a true partnership between a musician and a dancer, developing an instrument that would allow for active co-performance. Using a participatory design approach, we worked with sonification as a tool for systematically exploring the dancer’s bodily expressions. The exploration used a “spatiotemporal matrix,” with a particular focus on sonic microinteraction. In the final performance, two Myo armbands were used for capturing muscle activity of the arm and leg of the dancer, together with a wireless headset microphone capturing the sound of breathing. In the paper we reflect on multi-user instrument paradigms, discuss our approach to creating a shared instrument using sonification as a tool for the sound design, and reflect on the performers’ subjective evaluation of the instrument.
