InfoMus Lab

Multimedia concert "Shells"

Palazzo Novellucci
Prato, Italy, July 6, 2003

"Shells", a piece for Tarogato (a traditional Hungarian single-reed wind instrument) and interactive music system, was first written in 1993 by Robert Rowe in collaboration with Esther Lamneck. The piece, about 10 minutes long, was part of a concert lasting for about 1 hour. The Tarogato part includes notated and improvised material. A dance improvisation is also performed on the music. The computer analyses the Tarogato performance and adds drones, ostinati, and counterpoint as the pieces progresses. At the same time, audio analysis generates visual feedback by expressively manipulating both pre-recorded images and the live images of the player and the dancer during the performance.  

Excerpt from the interactive video part controlled in real time by EyesWeb, photo by Matteo Ricchetti

The EyesWeb open platform was employed for audio analysis and for generation of visual content in real-time. The visual content consisted of expressive manipulation (e.g., in term of colors, deformation, application of filtering techniques) of both pre-recorded material stored in avi files and live images of the player and of the dancer (Douglas Dunn) gathered by a webcam. The application was distributed on two laptops connected by an Ethernet network: the first one responsible of audio analysis and the second one devoted to video processing. Robert Rowe's Cypher system carried out a parallel analysis of the music performance and was employed for real-time generation of audio content.