Giant Instrument

The Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) took part in this year's Cheltenham Science Festival - the leading UK public science event. Our two popular exhibits in the Discover Zone ("Interactive science for all ages") engaged thousands of schoolchildren, families, and others in the possibilities of emerging music technology.

Members of the Centre for Digital Music represented Queen Mary at the Pioneers '09 EPSRC exhibition. Technologies on dispaly from C4DM included the Sonic Visualizer, Daisyphone, and another exciting installment of the Giant (Shadow) Instrument.

Last week Samer Abdallah, Adam Stark, and Kurt Jacobson of the Presents crew went up to Liverpool for the HCI Conference and (re)Actor3. We were intending to do another installation of the Giant Instrument but there was some miss communication about the lighting and we didn't have anything that would do a focused beam. So we came up with the Shadow Instrument. A red wash is cast from behind the participant. By moving her body, the participant moves her shadow in and out of the white markers on the floor. This triggers sounds on the instrument.

On Thursday July 10th C4DM Presents took part in the Dana Centre's interactive event Making Music. A modified version of the Giant Instrument was installed in the Dana Centre's studio room. Instead of using stage spotlights as in our previous GI effort, we used a series of projectors to project images onto the floor. Again notes were triggered when the user steps into the 'spots'. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive and audience members gave some insightful ideas on how to improve the GI for next time.

This week C4DM Presents completed work on our sound installation for Shunt Lounge called the Giant Instrument. The concept is you play the instrument by moving in and out of these spotlights. We wanted to give the users a really fun interactive experience and sort-of recreate the feeling you get when you first learn to play a musical instrument. The work was a collaboration between Andrew Robertson, Adam Stark, Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut, Steve Welburn, and Kurt Jacobson. The team really came together and pulled off something great in a short time - exceeding all expectations. Chris Frauenberger and Stuart Battersby took some really great pics of the installation.