ACM CHI 2015 Course proposal on Musical Interfaces Accepted!

Our CHI 2015 course proposal, ‘Introduction to Creating Musical Interfaces’ has been accepted! By chance this was submission #101, and I’m thinking of retitling the course ‘Musical Interfaces 101’.

ACM CHI is the largest and most influential conference in the field of human-computer interaction (ヒューマン•インタフェース in Japanese).

The ACM CHI 2015 conference will be held in the Gangnam district of Seoul and pop musician Psy will be keynote speaker this year.

We also offer versions of the course at SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH ASIA, and NIME itself.

Live Performance at the Opening Reception of ACM Multimedia 2013

A little more than one year ago, Alex Jaimes and I collaborated on a live intermedia performance for the Opening Reception of the ACM Multimedia 2013 conference in Barcelona Spain. The video below records part of the performance, but it was made with a small pocket digital camera, using the built-in mic, and I was very preoccupied with the performance itself. Unfortunately this is the only record I have of the performance.

It was held October 24, 2013 at the Foment de les Arts i del Disseny, which is housed in an ancient stone building next to Barcelona’s Contemporary Art Museum. We worked with contemporary dancer Laida Azkona and violinist Paloma de Juan who was one of Alex’s colleagues at Yahoo Research Labs in Barcelona. Paloma’s day job is research engineer, whereas Laida is a profession contemporary dancer who has studied and performed around the world.

Again the quality of this video recording is not good, but perhaps it gives some impression of the performance.

The next video is from the first rehearsal for the live performance. Alex, Laida, and I met at my apartment the same day I arrived in Barcelona and we had our first rehearsal a day or two later. We had two more rehearsals after that, which includes a brief one after we had setup and sound-checked on the day of the opening reception. Since Alex and I worked remotely we could not prepare much beforehand, though I had already written and tested the programs needed for capturing movements and converting them to OSC for controlling the video projections. The video clips themselves were edited at the last moment, partly during a visit to Alex’s home in Barcelona. It was a busy but exciting trip!

SIGGRAPH ASIA 2014 Course: How to Design and Build New Musical Interfaces

Our course proposal was accepted at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2014. The course will be held December 3, 2014 in Shenzhen China. More information here. It will be great to have active participation at SIGGRAPH ASIA from Ritsumeikan !

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