Looking Outwards – 11 Min Lee

For this week’s project, I wanted to take a look at the computer-generated music from Clara Starkweather’s Student Project at Duke University. She uses a Kinect camera to detect the motions of her body parts and generate different sounds at different progressions. More accurately, the algorithm she wrote plays different instruments in response to the camera’s detection of the different body parts being moved.

In Starkweather’s project, she wrote her code using the software synthesis programming language called SuperCollider. In this video, Starkweather showcases her project by demonstrating the different audio sounds filling in as background music for the song “Golden” by Jill Scott. I admire this project because Starkweather states that she had to learn how to play a few instruments to write her code. Her musical stylistic choices are also manifested in her project and despite it being a hard task to create harmonizing sounds using different body parts to control different instruments, she does so in a seamless way.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ad8KG7tWc