CORPORA PROJECT
Corpora Project brings together musicians and dancers from the United States, Canada, France, and Germany to explore emotive possibilities of technologically mediated sound and movement improvisation combining Bob Pritchard’s KICASS system with my own bespoke DSP application, AZiLE. The current iteration of Corpora Project is:
Nolan Ehlers, Percussion
Martin Daigle, Percussion
Zoe Markle, Double bass
Benjamin Portzen, Electronics
Monika Kochowicz, Dance
Marie Levêque, Dance
The idea for Corpora Project emerged from the sense that, too often, artists are forced to compromise the expressivity and emotionality of their work when creating with novel technologies. In other words, the manner in which technology is used can obscure the piece itself and therefore inhibit the transmission of meaningful information between performers and audiences – the piece becomes “about” the technology.
By integrating Bob Pritchard’s KICASS (Kinect-Controlled Artistic Sensing System) with my own AZiLE, a semi-autonomous system for human-computer interaction, our aim was to offer an alternative.
In May of 2023, the six of us gathered at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media, and Technology (CIRMMT) in Montréal, Canada for a one-week residency of research and documentation. Featured on this page are two improvisations from that week, with more to come soon.
Technologically, the system is fairly simple: a Microsoft Kinect (V2) connected to a Windows computer takes care of the motion tracking using KICASS, and then sends the data over LAN to my computer running AZiLE. I can then map the dancer’s limb and body positions in space (X, Y, Z) to a variety of DSP parameters in realtime.
Some mappings are incredibly subtle – grain size, spectral threshold, pitch deviation – with the intent of allowing dancers to influence the soundworld by remaining rooted in their bodies and dancing as usual. Others, such as the freezing of sound and quadrophonic panning, give the dancers hands-on control over sound and facilitate a more dynamic interaction between improvising musicians and movers.
While not shown in either of these videos, this system can independently track two dancers simultaneously and allow each control over any number of DSP parameters. Similarly, all audio routing is modular and can be patched in realtime with independent signal chains for as many inputs as available.