Interactive Composition

New Zealand composer John Psathas has coordinated a team of seven composers and sound designers to create 13 compositions that will interact with visitors to The Wall, a new multimedia adventure at Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand.

Visitors to Our Space at Te Papa are able to upload images and videos, choose from a vast number of items in the museum’s database, or take photos of themselves then and there. They can then send these items to a huge 18mx2m video Wall. Using ‘wands’ they can animate and manipulate the images. John’s team has created the soundscape that will accompany this activity on the Wall.  According to Psathas:

“We wanted to ensure that the music would respond to the number of visitors using it and to the level of their activity—the ebb, flow and intensity of what they were doing—while ensuring that the aural result had musical integrity. We wanted something much more than the usual ambient drone.

“The compositional template David Downes and I invented involves a multi-layered ‘Musical Composition’ which can loop infinitely. There are 13 simultaneous levels or ‘States’ in the composition. It is easiest to think of all these ‘States’ going on at the same time, but only one of these is audible. A ‘Trigger Track’ defines points in the work where it can musically shift to another ‘State’, up or down in intensity. The newly audible ‘State’ might be a modulation in harmonic centre, a rhythmic change, a dynamic or density change—whatever the composer has defined. Which ‘State’ of the ‘Composition’ is audible at any given time will depend on the number of wands being used and the way in which they are being used. This is something quite new, to my knowledge there is nothing else like it in the world.”

For more on this project: http://sounz.org.nz/news_articles/show/120 or see the October 2008 issue of SOUNZnews.