Massive organ blown with Kinect
Melbourne Town Hall's instrument gets hands-free performance
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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."
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.
COMMENTS
Kinect isn't the important bit here...
Its Max/MSP/Jitter.
A visual programming language which is fully aimed at, you guessed it, multimedia aspects. However, its still a full fledged programming environment, just "not the way you're used to". See also:
http://cycling74.com/
Being a Max developer myself I question the relevance of the Kinect part. After all; it seems the Max program is doing all the work, and with that in mind I think he could have swapped the Kinect for any kind of camera. As long as it can captures motion then this motion can relatively easy be 'translated' into midi.
Re: Kinect isn't the important bit here...
That's probably why he refers to himself as a "sound designer" rather than a "musician", although after watching a few seconds of the clip, even that title seems to suggest he is reaching above his station.
Re: Kinect isn't the important bit here...
I ended up borrowing a Kinect for a few days and got it hooked up with Pd (open source Max/MSP) via a little OSC magic in no time - there are a couple of good libraries available.
This dude sure looks impressive on stage, but it looks like this piece has been basically pre-determined, sequenced really, with the role of the gestures changing as the piece trundles on. Pushing through a few instructions via MIDI on demand, when one has already decided it's going to be, say, a block of A minor on diapason, principal and 2', is trivial.
Meh. Move along.
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