In Friday’s (9/20) CNET News, Leslie Katz writes about the Computer Orchestra, an invention by three media and interaction design students from Switzerland’s Ecal University of Art and Design. The orchestra “lets users create and conduct their own orchestra by choosing an array of digital music samples and then assigning them to computers situated in a specific formation. The conductor arranges the separate ‘instruments’ on a computer screen. Michael Tilson Thomas wannabes can create their own sound snippets … upload them to the platform, and/or download music samples to integrate into their composition. Once the music is ‘written’ (put into the chosen sequence) using the Computer Orchestra program, the conductor can direct the orchestra with various body movements detected by a Kinect motion-sensing input device…. The project’s creators, Simon de Diesbach, Jonas Lacôte, and Laura Perrenoud, imagine a future in which music will change drastically and picture the Computer Orchestra as a kind of humanizing antidote to symphonies created and played entirely by algorithm.” The hybrid device combines “the archaic spatial arrangement of an orchestra with the concept of ‘screen musicians.’ ”
Posted September 24, 2013
