Break dancing robot synth drum machine noises

Photo by Colin Chipcase

A few weeks ago I had some involvement in a residency at Dance Base in Edinburgh with dancer and choreographer Skye Reynolds. She has been collaborating for a long time with sound designer Jung In Jung (whose awesome work includes the SonicBella) in order to develop performances and systems that use different types of technology to allow dancers to generate and control sound and music in real time through their movements.

For this residency I helped Skye and Jung In start using Wiimotes strapped to the dancers’ limbs, much in the same way I did for Exercise Magic!!. Jung In was then able to use some the data to trigger sounds developed by herself and composer Pippa Murphy.

During my short involvement in the residency I worked with one of the dancers, David Aing, to make a special performance tailored to his crazy amazing robot breakdance routine. I made a set of custom software to let him control two different types of synthesizers, as well as a pulsing drum machine. I was super happy with how it turned out, I felt it really matched his style. We got to show this at a (very well attended) presentation at the end of the residency. Check out the video!

Thanks to everyone who came by! I thought the whole thing went really well. If all goes well I hope to work with David and Skye more in the future to develop the work a bit further.

Jung In has many more pictures and videos of the other performances from that presentation up on her blog, in addition to loads of information about the development of the whole project.

Comment (1)

JFS

Great Stuff! I love the ability of the dancer to take advantage of the technology to make interesting music!

13 years ago

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