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Massive organ blown with Kinect

Melbourne Town Hall's instrument gets hands-free performance

Composer and creative developer Chris Vik has used Microsoft's Kinect tools to play the pipe organ in the Melbourne Town Hall.

Vik describes himself as “a sound designer/electronic music producer/Max developer” and has released music under the name Synaecide.

Since 2011 he's worked with Kinect and has developed "KiNECTAR" (pictured below), software he says "allows advanced conditioning of hand position data for output to external devices/software over MIDI and OSC."

Kinectar

In a video describing the performance at the Town Hall, Vik says the software "lets me build a whole bunch of events and actions that take information from your hand position and body position and convert that into music." The software relies on different zones, each of which triggers a different sound, note or scale.

The result was a performance called Carpe Zythum that saw Vik manipulate the organ on stage, while singer Elise Richards lent her own pipes to the effort.

Vik even donned a tux and tails for the performance, during which he looks a bit like a demented traffic cop with a Phantom of the Opera fixation.

Check out the video here.

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