Muse.com is writing software for real-time gestural performance environment
on game consoles acting as multimedia hubs.
The first result is a real-time visual synthesizer, called Sky.
What does it do? It may be easier to show who can do what at each age level
of expertise:
4 year old performer
8 year old collaborator
12 year old orchestrator
16 year old developer
A four year old girl plays her favorite Peter and the Wolf CD and her game
console transforms into her very own play box. She uses a graphics
tablet and stylus like a crayon to lay down a riot of animated color.
She knows the commands: good, bad, back, forth, stop and go. Through
these commands, palettes and rules adapt to fit her preferences. Whenever
she plays the same CD, the same performances emerge, which she can overlay
with new ones. Now and then, mom grabs one of her pieces and emails
it to grandpa.
An eight year old boy plugs his midi guitar into his computer and starts a
DVD movie. Magically, a tic-tac-toe grid appears that bears some resemblance
to the show Hollywood Squares. But instead of actors, thumbnails of
live web performances appear. Even though there may be a million performers
online, the combination of his guitar and the DVD movie helps him to select
the best session, within a few clicks. What appears is a full screen
jam session with two other performers. His DVD disk and an mp3 sound
file synchronize so that all his friends hear the same music and view the
same images. He starts to strum out color pulses on his midi guitar,
while someone else is scrawling out lyrics with a graphics tablet, and another
is drumming out images. Everyone sees and hears the same result and
it’s really cool! Chances are they’ll meet again.
A twelve year old girl could have easily orchestrated the above session. She
uses a tree widget as a patch bay. She connects the midi-drum branch
to a DVD-image branch and she connects the midi-guitar to the palette-pulse
branch. The orchestration widget provides immediate gratification in the same
vein as an old modular synthesizer. She can patch parts together and instantly
hear or see a result.
A sixteen year old boy can create new effects by writing small snippets of
code. He scripts out a sequence of rules that interleave two images and transforms
them to create a new one.
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