DELQA Inside the Music of Matthew Dear Behind The Scenes

Technology’s allowing for this openness.
It’s this living, breathing sound sculpture.
You can play with it, and tweak it.
I wouldn’t make the song that I made for
DELQA at any other point in my career or my
life because it only works for a space like
that.
To have that opportunity, and to meet wonderful
new people and learn from them and see what
they’re doing and get ideas that I wouldn’t
have come up with, I mean, that’s the best
. . . that’s art.
We saw this project as an opportunity to create
something that had never been done, pulling
together an amazing artist with a team of
amazing artists using Microsoft’s technology.
Seeing the guys break it apart, I’m seeing
the guts of the system.
It’s a lot of math and a lot of numbers.
These guys are smart; they’re really smart.
The big idea that we were exploring was being
able to step inside of Matthew’s music.
This piece is really about creating a sonic
environment.
So one of the ways that we’re going to achieve
that is by installing 40 loud speakers throughout
the space.
Those will all be linked together into a spatial
audio system that allows for a three-dimensional
field of sound.
You’ll be inside of all these different
musical ideas that make up one beautiful composition.
We were able to leverage the Microsoft Kinect’s
ability to track people’s movements spatially
through this experience.
The Kinect is everywhere in this thing.
You’re almost always covered by a Kinect.
We specifically sourced this fabric material.
It was opaque to the depth cameras, so we
can actually read the surface of the fabric,
but it was transparent to the colored infrared
cameras, so we can actually see through it.
As people push on the walls and displace the
membranes, they’re actually able to change
the quality of the music.
Different areas of the installation affect
the music in different ways.
Sometimes a user will be changing the actual
part that’s playing.
Sometimes they’ll be introducing new parts
into the music.
We wanted every interaction to feel very powerful
for the audience.
So, if we take the drum part for example,
as they press in, the rhythmic density of
it becomes much more complex, but we’re
also changing the tamboral qualities of those
synthesized drum sounds.
All of these parameters allow the audience
to have a multidimensional influence across
the composition.
So you could visit this piece on a number
of occasions and you’ll hear something different
each time.
It would never be the same if you went there
twice.
Our desire was to create a new type of architecture,
influenced by how we experience sound.
Doing interactive design is really about creating
a magical experience, and having really powerful
things like a Kinect that help you create
those experiences.
There’s so much that we can do with a project
like this.
The more accessible these technologies become,
the more people are able to use them and do
surprising things with them.
People want to make music, people want to
be part of the music making process.
Technology allows that.
Your mind is totally free to wander.
There’s no right or wrong answer.
It’s just however far you want to push it.
To be able to bend music, make music, and
put that in different worlds, that’s what
makes this fun.