Shall We Music
Everybody is a speaker
Illy Company launched the challenge of designing a new form of social events where conviviality was the main goal. What better way to trigger convivial moments than using Music? Shall we Music?
| abstract |
Music is a careful composition of sounds, rythm and instruments. Looking at the event, we see people in social compositions. These two observations lead to the idea of recomposing music through social behaviour. Taking music to its pieces could mean listening to each instrument separately. If every person at the event is representing and playing an instrument we could say, EVERYBODY IS A SPEAKER!
By walking around in the event area and coming together in groups the crowd would then be creating a moving soundscape, reorganising the original music in new and changing compositions. The scenarios created, evidently lead to situations which we referred to as “making a band”, which we considered to be quite a convivial moment. Since the bands are formed through their social behavior, the unusual compositions of the instruments and tracks would allow for a whole new sound experience. The guests of the event would become actors. They were acting as musicians, interpreters and composers. Each person was given a speaker object which played the instrument of their choice. The guests would be forming a moving soundscape.
We wanted to create a musical experience platform. The project is a mixture of an installation and an object oriented design solution. It has a design that can be applied to specific situations where a musical experience is wished and interactions shall be triggered through playful interactions.
| design solution |
The Invitation to the event will direct you to the homepage. You can login, choose your instrument and find the necessary information about the happening. When arriving to the party your instrument is waiting for you at the welcome desk. If you had no time to register before the event, you can sign in right there and choose your instrument: the Drum, the Bass, the Guitar, the Piano and the Saxophone.
The Instruments are made of a translucent plastic and have some characteristics that can be modified in order to enable individual expressions and music taste. Each player can regulate the volume of his speaker. A button on the instrument let’s you choose the typology/genre of the music. So for example, if you have a guitar, you can switch your sound between Rock, Classic, Reggae, Pop and Blues. The type of music that you are playing is represented by a color in which the instruments are glowing. The intensity of the light and its flashing speed can be manually regulated and used to indicate some sort of state of emotion. The meaning of these parameters can be defined for each event according to the subject of the night. An audioplayer is streaming the music in it’s different tracks. Each kind of instruments can receive the five streams with the different styles of music. All the instruments have a locator tag. The system is recording all the movements and changes in style the players make. In the aftermath of the event all experiences can be reproduced. The guest of the event can log in to the homepage and download the desired parts of their experience. In order to create the soundscape, the soundtrack for the event has to be either composed to fit the theme or can be bought from a musical platform like guitar hero or rockband. In order to provide the different style of musical tracks midi files could be used, as they are parametric music data.
This project was published in Illywords, on March 2010.
| team members |
Christoph Thüer, Deniz Talug, Ivan Pecorari & Joana da Matta