Nonetheless, here I've been all my life, daydreaming away, trying to intellectualize some new way of combining my two greatest passions in life (aside from human relationships and all that jazz): dance and music. By the looks of this blog you may not realize that as well as a music obsessive, I am a diehard dancer. The dance floor is where I belong; it has always been my home and my church. I've accepted the reality that I may not ever again make it to the stage, having followed paths in life which have rendered a professional career in dance impractical, and perhaps impossible.
But I've never truly given up the ghost.
AND NOW, LIFE IS NEW AGAIN and birds are chirping. In my recent quest to find innovation in dance and also nurture my desire to create music, I determined that the missing link between dance and music, or dance and stage visuals, is the dancer becoming the musician/technician (and vice versa). What if, in the context of a live music experience, the dancer were no longer resigned to looking pretty on stage when there's not much else to look at? Why can't the body-in-motion be the vehicle for the audiovisual experience, a central player in the production journey?
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| I dunno, fuck, something like that maybe |
Enter motion-controlled AV technology, like the Xbox Kinect, Leap Motion, and even Wii before that (but I'm pretty sure Wii is in a bar somewhere with the Blackberry, drowning their sorrows of obsolescence). The Kinect, like Wii, was originally intended as a way for gamers to control the screen action with their own body movements (getting gamers off their asses may be the most impressive thing about this technology, actually). But of course artists took that idea and blew it the fuck up (motion-controlled music production is not entirely new. The theremin has been around since 1928, and Jimmy Page famously used it in live Zeppelin performances, but somehow expanding on that idea is just now catching fire).
Last night a friend sent me this video of musician/tech queen Imogen Heap presenting her "musical gloves" at a music tech conference in 2012. I have been buggin out ever since. With the help of a whole technology team, she developed the gloves to be "gestural music ware," allowing her to create and make fine manipulations to sounds and effects, real-time in 3D space, without touching her clunky old instruments (skip to 13:30 if you just want to see her demo a song).
There are loads of examples of motion-controlled art already happening, some filmmakers but mainly straight musicians who are already making their art with production software like Ableton Live and don't seem to really need or care about using the entire body in performance.
It is the complexity and sheer responsiveness of these gloves which seems to differentiate it from other Kinect-based gestural productions. In videos I'm seeing of people using Kinect + Ableton but not the glove tech, movements seem to be limited to hands and arms (so too with Leap Motion). So I have a lot of questions: is the current technology being applied to movement of the whole body? Is it easy enough to make real-time songs with the Kinect, not just manipulate effects whose sonic construction is pre-programmed? Could a producer be doing one thing and a dancer complement it through gestural tech? Can I designate different body parts to different instrument families and switch between them at any time? Can I add lights?! WHERE CAN I GET THE GLOVES??!!
I'm not a born techie, and I've never had consistent patience to compose songs with production software, but this, Christ Almighty. Get my body involved, and I am there all the way. It's all too much. I'm so excited. I haven't been this turned on since Dave Gahan reached his arm out and smiled at my crazy ass dancing at my first Depeche Mode concert.
So for all you developers/programmers/tech wizards who make dreams come true, hit me up. Let's do this before we are all dead.
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