KRASHCAN: INTERACTIVE ORCHESTRA
Krashcan explores the music created of everyday life. This is music constructed from small amounts of digital communication where emphasis and meaning are made through the motion of the audience controlling how much of the snippet is played back and what repeats. The audience was prompted to type their last text received and sent into the chat on zoom. While each individual text had meaning, in collection they create chaos. These text snippets were collected and converted to a repeating poem that audience members could control by looping or shifting to play faster or slower. This poem was then fed into an AI chatbot who expanded on the poem and converted it into a conversation. Through repeated pass throughs of the texting, chatbot, and movement control of playback different elements of the words began to take form, build story, and create meaning.
Orchestra of Movement
Left/right motion changes pitch. Up/Down motion changes volume and placing the eye in the center of the red circle loops the sound. Alexis Bacon tracked individual participants in Cycling ’74’s Max MSP and translated that movement into control of sound (such as tempo, pitch, volume). All participants were invited to vote on a binary choice. Each vote was counted and signified with a sound. As more votes came in (individuals could vote multiple times) the volume and number of sounds increased for the majority vote. A result was declared either at the end of a specific interval or when the difference between votes reached a set amount.
Iterative Cycles
Krashcan examined how music influences movement, and movement influences music. Did the audience move to the music or did they make music by moving? Would audience chat entries change as they heard the chat played back?
National Performances
- Performing/Arts/Technology Presentation, University of Michigan (March 2023)
- New Music Gathering, Portland, OR (June 2022)
- OperaHack (July 2021)
- SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States) (April 2021)