Wind, rain and thunder, embodied as music/sound instruments. The Elemental is a new development in music expression, gathering recent advances in real-time digital audio design via synthesis (i.e., without pre-recorded sounds) and new human-machine interfaces, to appropriate natural sounds in an axis of expression that traverses since sounds as found in nature up to the abstract experience, passing by what I call surreal performance: a new territory where natural sounds are bent, shaped, by the trajectory imprinted by the performer’s body.
In the video above, Ana Carpes performs the Elemental, and I perform Outono, a composition of mine, on the 7-strings guitar.
Below, multiartist Maria Flor tests the instrument for the first time.
A first paper explains how Elemental was implemented, in terms of its audio synthesis and mappings between gesture and sound, and shows the results of two validations: in Plouhinec-France, with a general public, and, in Recife-Brazil, with an audience composed mostly of musicians, dancers, designers of digital musical instruments and related areas. Most participants found the Elemental suitable for expressive applications, whether relating primarily to sound (such as music), body (such as dance) or mixed performances.
The instrument has not yet debuted on stage. A video documenting the composition process for a performance, where I use Elemental in the form of a VSTi plugin within the Reaper software can be seen below:
A second paper should be out soon (and another publication here on the site), situating the instrument aesthetically, talking about electroacoustic music, cognition, the Elemental VSTi, the mobile version and a proposal for a methodology for developing digital instruments for surreal performance.
Soon I will also talk about and provide links to the workshop I gave as a result of my artistic residency at the II Latin American Meeting of Sound Art - SomaRumor, in October 2021.
Resources
Tiago Brizolara, Sylvie Gibet, and Caroline Larboulette. 2020. Elemental: a Gesturally Controlled System to Perform Meteorological Sounds. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Birmingham City University, pp. 470–476. [BibTex]
Thanks
In addition to my supervisors Sylvie Gibet and Caroline Larboulette, I thank João Tragtenberg and the Federal University of Pernambuco, in the people of professors Filipe Calegario and Giordano Cabral for the partnership in the international mobility that I developed with the Centro de Informática. The mobility was financed by the department of Morbihan and the Bretagne region, in the context of my doctorate at the Université Bretagne Sud (France).