Thesis dreams

No joke, I literally had a dream about what I want to do for my thesis. Several ideas have been floating around my noggin, but there wasn't one that I really was interested in. I was in the middle of reading a book called "The Phantom Tollbooth". It's a wonderful children's novel about a boy who is bored and finds a portal to another world... I highly recommend to anyone who likes getting their imagination on! A friend randomly loaned it to me... at any rate, I fell asleep while reading this book and I had a dream where the book left off... it had a character named Chroma conducting this 1,000 piece orchestra in order to create a sunrise. I can't really describe the dream except that it was incredibly beautiful, the music and the visuals of seeing these many players creating this moment in time. The closest thing I could describe it as being similar to is the Northern Lights.

So for the physical computing component, I am interested in making some conducting gloves. I did a bit of research on this topic, and many people have done variations on the idea of gesture recognition and conducting music, visuals, virtual orchestras, etc. However, I believe my direction is unique in that I want to combine video tracking with sensors to accentuate the movements and clearly capture every little movement. I'm not speaking broad gestures... I myself have tried conducting and played the alto saxophone in concert band so I know that its not just about keeping time and looking dramatic on a stage. Every conductor has a distinct style and I thought it would be interesting to visually see the difference in their style not reacting to the sonic information, but the actual movements of a practiced conductor.

Therefore, someone who for example does not have experience in conducting would not be able to use my device... which is OK by me because I much rather prefer to see professionals performing live art for me. I feel that my role as an artist is to interpret the score visually, and allow variation upon how the conductor interprets the score musically, thus perform the visual score I create to go with the musical one. I have some experience designing and running lights for theater, so I understand how live performance is enhanced and fluid with some visual flow of light and in this case video projection.

At any rate, it goes nicely along with my first project using gloves and I think if I do this I'll probably make the gloves from scratch... did I mention I've tried my hand at designing and constructing costumes? I hope to combine my device with Max/MSP/Jitter and design a rough prototype of hand gestures controlling a multisource video feed.

Oh, and I'm sooo stoked that NIME will be hosted in New York this year in June... what luck! :)