InfoMus Lab

Concert "Electronic Frankenstein"


Opera House Carlo Felice, Auditorium Montale, 
Genova, Italy, November 21 - 23, 2003

 

The concert (composer and director Andrea Liberovici, scenery Paolo Giacchero, actress Ottavia Fusco) depicts the contemporary composer as a kind of Frankenstein, creating a new sound creature starting from infinite combinations of existing sounds. The composition is like a live body, arising from several music genres and sub-genres meeting and fighting between them in a precise correspondence with body parts: head, feet, hands, and so on. In this mapping, every sound is conceived as a character emerging from the integration of music, words, light, and gesture.

The concert is divided into two parts. For the first one, "Frankenstein Cabaret", several writers and poets were asked to write a sentence getting inspiration from one anatomical or psychical body part. The text of the second part, "Electronic Lied", is extracted from messages gathered from chat lines on the theme of love. The philosophical issue of identity is addressed by considering the exchanges of messages, the unexpected meetings, the change of identity and genre, and the anonymity that modern communication means on the Internet (e.g., chats) allow.    

The EyesWeb open platform was employed for motion analysis and for generation of visual content in real-time. In particular, some strategies for direct mapping of detected motion cues and features of the output images were experimented. For example, features like color, amount of deformation, amount and color of body tracks, etc. were associated to extracted expressive cues such as Quantity of Motion, Motion Direction, Amount of Upward Movement, Contraction Index.

The EyesWeb open platform and the EyesWeb Expressive Gesture Processing Library were employed for motion analysis and for developing mapping strategies.