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Posts Tagged ‘interactive’

Conduct Your Own Orchestra

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 2, 2014| 2 Comments »

I can think of a few people I know who would love to conduct an orchestra just once.

A couple years ago, I was telling Suzanne and Erik how the Melrose Symphony Orchestra had a drawing at the Holiday Pops concert for an audience member to conduct the last number, and Erik said he would really love to do that. Given that he won a business-plan competition yesterday, he might feel like conducting an orchestra right now. Since there’s no orchestra handy, the next best thing might be an electronic simulator.

Writes Liz Stinson for Wired, “Most of us will never get the chance to conduct a real symphony orchestra, and that’s probably for the best. But a fake symphony orchestra made up of towering speakers, motion controllers, and touchscreens? Totally doable.

“A new installation at the Mendelssohn Museum in Leipzig, Germany lets you do exactly that, no music school required. The Mendelssohn Effektorium, by design studio WhiteVOID, is an interactive installation that allows you to have complete control over a virtual symphony. In this world you’re Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and your instruments come in the form of 13 upright speakers with digital displays on them.

“Each of these speakers corresponds to a certain instrument group: woodwinds, brass, percussion, vocals and so on. It’s up you how much spotlight each instrument gets and how fast the tempo moves.” More at Wired. Be sure to play the video demonstration of someone conducting this way.

Photo: WhiteVOID
A Leap Motion sensor calculates your speed based on the pendulum interval of your movements and adjusts the tempo accordingly.

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Interactive Street Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 20, 2013| 4 Comments »

Candy creates interactive street art. Her “Before I Die” wall garnered a lot of attention — and contributors. Folks wanted more.

So she decided to create a website explaining in detail how others could replicate the wall.

Here she tells how it all started: “It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget what really matters to you. After I lost someone I loved very much, I thought about death a lot. This helped clarify my life, the people I want to be with, and the things I want to do, but I struggled to maintain perspective. I wondered if other people felt the same way. So with help from old and new friends, I painted the side of an abandoned house in my neighborhood in New Orleans with chalkboard paint and stenciled it with a grid of the sentence “Before I die I want to _______.” Anyone walking by could pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their lives, and share their personal aspirations in public space.

“It was an experiment and I didn’t know what to expect. By the next day, the wall was bursting with handwritten responses and it kept growing: Before I die I want to… sing for millions, hold her one more time, eat a salad with an alien, see my daughter graduate, abandon all insecurities, plant a tree, straddle the International Date Line, be completely myself…  People’s responses made me laugh out loud and they made me tear up. They consoled me during my toughest times. I understood my neighbors in new and enlightening ways.”

Candy’s how-to page reads, in part, “Once you’ve created a wall, you can share your wall here by creating a mini-site! A mini-site is a page where you can post photos and responses and document the story of your wall. It’s super easy to use, absolutely free, and no technical skills are required. Visit the Budapest mini-site to see an example.”

Everything you need if you’re going to create a “Before I Die” wall is here.

Photo: Before I Die

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