Looking Outwards 10 – Joanne Chui

GE Wang is a professor for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford. His research focuses on interactive design in music in collaboration with programming languages. He created Smule and Magic Piano, both for the Iphone. I was interested in this piece, Twilight, because it is both a musical performance and an art performance, and integrates what GE Wang is focused on, which is interactive design in music. Using their laptops, the orchestra is able to translate thir body movements into sound/pitch, and because of that creates a visual performance as well. Something interesting with which they used the laptop seemed to mostly be biased towards gradual changes in sound, and slow build up of music, which is interesting. The algorithm used to create the music and select the pitch is definitely reliant on the length of the string attached to their wrists that the performers use.