Tag: Interactive

Cooking Music Algorithms

Project
A series of sonic-gustatory experiences, of experimental electroacoustic ASMR video performances. The combination of a seemingly mundane cooking performance interacting with an autonomous music algorithm of a complex feedback network. A celebration of the mundane, a festival of insignificance contrasted by the meticulous video production of a complex-sounding sound-art performance.

A short-circuit of the gustatory experience with the acousmatic experience: the auditory is feeding the gustatory while the latter is listening back.

The composer is performing a supposedly instructional video of cooking an omelette or a pizza. A set of microphones are set up to listen very closely and to record every micro-movement of his performance. From preparing the ingredients, kneading the dough or hitting eggs, to cutting vegetables and herbs or tasting the resulting meal – all sounds of the cooking process are fed in real-time into a naively intelligent autonomous algorithm, which sonically analyses and reinterprets every sound to a new extended sonic reality. The performer’s movements tend to be gently slow, meditative, while the interactive sound results as a complex reflection. Every sound and gesture is interconnected into a complete sonic-gustatory performance, tickling and teasing those senses of the auditor. While spectator-listener can comfortably sit back, observe and listen to the evolution of the sonic-nutritional process while letting it influence her autonomous sensory response.

The overall project includes the following three volumes:   

  1. How to make an omelette – with interactive sound: a four minute performance, posted in 3 parts over three weeks focusing on the audience of Instagram

2. How to make a pizza – with interactive sound:  An one-hour video performance commissioned and presented as an online premiere-event for Ensemble Ipse, New York. Part 2 develops the idea and explores the experience in its extensive form, having a more detailed composition process over one hour duration.

3. Re-pizzing: the third part goes back to short form videos mainly intended for Instagram audience. Every small video is a remix in terms of music and editing, creating a new sensory-packed compressed in terms of visuals and sound series of experiences. Experimenting more with parallel music layering remixing combinations.

The combination of the seemingly mundane cooking performance is interacting with a complex sonic feedback network, the autonomously driven music algorithm Ephemeron. An eco-systemic installation, through its sonic process creating a dynamic living environment for the performer-listener. Sound processes are created solely by the sounds in space, all connected to a single sonic entity surrounding the performer-listener, creating a sonic ecosystem including autonomous sonic entities of constant interactions.  As a sound result, the work emerges from the interactions among space, software and performer-listener as an ever-changing living algorithmic ecosystem. The live ecosystem results from a live algorithm with the ability to ‘listen’ through the microphones and ‘express’ itself through the loudspeakers. The work through this software is able to organise its structure; it is able to self-organise and adapt in space.

Inspiration comes from the internet trend of cooking videos mainly used to entertain through the sharing and connecting with an audience with gustatory experience. At the same time there is a rapport with the interestingly peculiar trend of ASMR internet performances, which aim to sympathetically tune to the sensory phenomenon triggered mainly by sound.

Treating the theme of insignificance from its futility to the appreciation of the beauty of things as they are. A silent challenge of closely observing micromovements, listening closely to the surrounding microsounds, and distorting them through the power of an artificial imagination-like sonic mirror.

Credits
Concept Music Composition | Algorithmic Development | Performance | Direction &Video Editing: Phivos-Angelos Kollias

Cinematography | Camera: Jade Wu

Shot in: Honig Studios, Berlin

Thanks to : Jiannis Sotiropoulos for Honig Studios | Mike Robbins for the feedback

Long form performance (vol.2) commissioned by: Ensemble Ipse | Max Giteck Duykers | Joseph Di Ponio

The Lost Glitches

THE GAME

  • The Lost Glitches is a digital card game set in a virtual world made of merged collective memories
  • I am currently composing the music for all 5 levels and the current promotion trailer.
  • It is a is a game in development by Mimunga, created with the team of Honig Studios

    here’s the first trailer with my music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e78A6SD5Do0
  • Players choose a character and a syndicate to play as and build a deck to use in combat.
  • The game world is divided into territories reflecting the limited memories of the Glitches.
  • Players fight to expand their territory, gaining control over more of the virtual world as they progress through the game.
  • The game is currently in development

Created with the team of Honig Studios

A Game of Mimunga Gaming

Captured

Project
The project of Hanna Haaslahti Captured is a participatory installation, which captures your face and creates a new identity for you in a collective scenario taking place in virtual world.

Captured enables people to step into virtual world as a digital double, making them actors and spectators in the same time. The doubles take different roles in a narrative simulation modeling unpredictable moods of human crowd behavior.

Which role will you take on? The bully, the target or the bystander? And what does it say about your primal instincts in watching aggressive social behaviour?

Music
The music expresses interactively the actions of the captured Avatars. The piano is the central ingredient of the orchestration, used in its conventional way, but also by recording of sympathetic resonances.

Each avatar carries around her own piano resonance, while in the peaceful walking state. Each resonance is follows its avatar while collectively composes a wall of sound made out an interwoven network of small. When violence starts, each action is depicted by the frantic gestures of a small music ensemble: piano clusters, drum rolls, cymbal hits, bass drum kicks. Music gestures and avatars gestures are directly interconnected as one gesture.

Silbersalz – International Science & Media Festival, 15.-19. September 2021, Halle, Germany
Expanded/BFI London Film Festival, 6.-17. October 2021, London, UK
CPH:DOX festical 23. March – 3. April 2022, Copenhagen

Credits:
Lead Artist: Hanna Haaslahti
Lead Developers: Mike Robbins, Alap Parikh, Tyler Henry
Capture Station Design and Construction: Panu Heikkilä

Interactive Music Composition: Phivos-Angelos Kollias
“Hello World” music track by Jamie Perera / reorchestrated by Kollias

Producer: Marko Tandefelt
Co-Producer: Harmke Heezen
Produced by Fantomatico and High Road Stories

Place VR

Project
Place is a VR experience that revives the Great Synagogue of Aleppo through digital walls and memories.

Since the end of 2022, Place is exhibited in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The prototypes of the project have been shown at the film festivals DOK Leipzig and Docaviv .

Sound
As the project is trying to recreate the experience of the Synagogue, like a archeological reconstruction with the senses, also the sound follows the same path.

Thus the approach within the VR experience and the videos, was mainly to recreate the feeling of being back then and there.

I used several archived sounds mixed with contemporary recordings to travel the listener back to the environment of Alepo.

Created in collaboration with High Road Stories productions:
Mike Robbins & Harmke Heezen

Proper Motion VR

Project
A music Virtual Reality installation, inspired by the images and sounds of the ever-changing night sky.

Music
In this VR project, I created an interactive music ‘score’ using electro-acoustic music tools and coding in MaxMSP. The main idea comes from different forms of mapping, from the ‘mapping’ explanations we attempt to perform in order to explain Nature, to understand and appreciate music, or a movement that becomes sound.

In Proper Motion, sound and vision interconnect as a unified whole. Our actions are equally apparent visually and sonically. A human gesture becomes a musical gesture. But what are we interacting with? What are we hearing?

Following the premise that everything becomes something else at some time, and mirroring the same approach with that of the visuals, we have started with musical found objects which are reformed, remapped, recomposed into something completely new, while incorporating seeds of their origins.

We reverse-engineer original scientific processes used in mapping electromagnetic spectra to audible sound frequencies: the sun’s fluctuating radiation, the pulse of the earth passing through a meteor shower, a chorus of atmospheric disturbances released at daybreak.

The motion capture of a dancer, recorded somewhere else in space and time, is likewise a mapping, in this case, of physical movement into a set of points floating in a digital space.

A decades-old, archaic electronic music composition used electricity run through wires and circuits to map musical thought onto plastic discs we call records.

In  itself data is devoid of meaning and emotion, beyond the simple fact it exists, and it reveals patterns. But what happens when they start to be mapped to one another: the billion year-old light of a star talks to a sixty year old piece of electronic music that causes a women’s hand gesture, originally made years ago, to move in a completely different way?

Premiere at the BFI London Film Festival
October 7-19 2020

Created in collaboration with High Road Stories productions:
Mike Robbins & Harmke Heezen

El Hijo

Project
A non-violent stealth video game, where a young boy tries to escape and find his mother. A tribute to Sergio Leone’s westerns and the music of Ennio Morricone.

Music
The music for the multi-awarded video game “El Hijo” is an interactive orchestral score, dynamically changing throughout the game. Thematically, the score engages in a musical dialogue with Ennio Morricone’s iconic work on Spaghetti Westerns, to whom the music is dedicated. It revisits the Wild West settings of the Spaghetti Western genre in a non-violent context.

The music interactively leverages the player’s movements within the game to influence the symphonic orchestration. As the central game character, El Hijo, moves around various environments such as a dark monastery, a dusty desert, or a bustling town, different aspects of the orchestration are revealed, thus embodying the diversity of the journey experienced by the young boy.

Space not only unfolds the narrative journey of the main character, El Hijo, but also expands the orchestral composition: a dynamic orchestration in space, guided by the user’s journey as El Hijo. A turn at a corner might reveal an angry monk, underscored by a slide guitar; a threatening cowboy approaching, accompanied by a crescendo from a string trio. An ostinato from the timpani and the double bass punctuate the overwhelming ride on a cart, while moving in the darkness is met with the sonorous tones of low brass instruments.

This composition represents the culmination of my previous musical research into the expressive nature of physical space, exploring how space can play an active creative role equal to other musical dimensions, such as melody and harmony. I designed the musical interactions specifically for this game and they were implemented by programmer Stephan Schüritz.

Created with the team of Honig Studios

Published by HandyGames

Symphony of Noise VR

A Symphony of Noise is a music VR experience, letting the user experience a fantastic world made and governed by sound.

Immerse yourself into a sensational symphony of everyday sounds, which are lifted into the unusual through mixing, superimposition and modulation.

Loosely based on Matthew Herbert’s book “The Music”, A Symphony of Noise aims to inspire users to think about the way they understand music. The complete soundscape of the application refrains from the usage of musical instruments and instead works with familiar and common everyday noises. These are complemented with the user’s voice or other auditory input in order to create an individual and personal experience.

The user embarks on a journey through inner and outer dimensions of the human being – starting with the first heartbeat, he gradually moves into the world of nature, the man-made, and the supernatural. Visual hints invite the viewer to participate: Conscious breathing, talking, singing, and hand movements are all different interactions triggering something special in the digital worlds and leaving a personal auditory fingerprint.

Awards/Nominations/Festivals

Award of excellence in sound design  at FIVARS Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories 2020

Top XR installations of 2019 – Forbes

nominated Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction – IDFA

Nominated VR NOW awards

Reeperbahn Festival

VRNow Festival

Impossible Bottles

Project
A music-rhythm game, a celebration of electronic music. The player is playing along the music, controlling a tribe of dancing robots with the objective to revitalise the earth with renewable energy.

A mad professor’s robot lab made out of music machines of the era in question, machines that give energy to this robot with the rhythm of the music.

Created with the team of Honig Studios

Fantaventura VR

Project
FantaVentura is an interactive, psychedelic music VR experience created for the German band ‘Die Fantastischen Vier’.
The VR experience uses Leap Motion hand-tracking, interactive sound, volumetric video, animation, 360 film, to tell a story that is as much about time and aging, relationships, trust and loyalty as it is about members of the band dropping acid on a tropical beach 25 years ago, and changing the way they saw the world.   

Music
FantaVentura was the result of another creative collaboration with Mike Robbins in a Virtual Reality project. I focused in reinterpreting interactively existing music, reorganising it in a completely new VR experience. The challenge was the creative constrain of using sound elements inspired by the specific piece of music, trying to stay as close to the original. In some cases, literally by using sounds coming directly from the composition or in other by using sound processes and reusing them in an interactive manner, or in others by sounds inspired by the original piece. The creative sound creation in a psychedelic inspired setting was a creative playground:  

  • The sound of a closing door with the echo of a snare.
  • The sound of frantic string orchestra produced by flying seahorses
  • Iconic synth sound used for the beam produced by the user
  • The sound of soap bubble popping while planets were casually exploded by the user

Another part of the work, was the use of ambisonic sound for the 360 videos. The attempt was to keep the voice In a simple manner, but at the same time, enhance the sounds in a surrounding environment using some contemporary technics of perception in spatialisation. This part of the job was rather technical in order to keep clarity in the voice while being creative add some new elements.

A 6DOF version for HTC Vive is available for download on Steam and a 360 version can be seen on the Telekom Magenta app.

Exhibitions:
September 2019 – IFA, Berlin, Germany
September 2019 – IAA, Frankfurt, Germany
January – August 2020 – Stadtpalais Museum für Stuttgart, Germany

Cancelled due to COVID-19:
March 2020 – CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, Denmark
May 2020 – FMX, Stuttgart, Germany
June 2020 – VRHAM!, Hamburg, Germany

Produced by:
High Road Stories
Radar Media
gebrüder beetz filmproduktion
Musikwirtschaft GmbH

Fish swimming casually at the beach while looked by an eye inside a hovering bubble
Project team with the Fanta4 band members in the presentation at IFA exhibition, Berlin

Milli meets the Arts

The story is the second part of Milli’s adventures. It comes in the form of a free interactive and personalized web book that aims to introduce preschoolers to the world of fine arts.
Through four chapters, children are learning about Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism.
The Music reflects the equivalent music esthetic tendencies, also reflecting sonically those esthetic schools.

Videos

Introduction
Menu Music
Chapter 1 – Impressionism
Chapter 1 – Impressionism – colour combinations
Chapter 2 – Expressionism
Chapter 2 – Expressionism – timbre melody
Chapter 3 – Cubism
Chapter 4 – Surrealism
Chapter 4 – Surrealism – surreal combinations
Chapter 5 – Finale