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Someone is playing a sort of a squeeze box that is electronic, so you can spin the end of it. Plus it has accelerometers. It’s kind of demo-y, but there’s potential there.
This comes from a movement-based design approach. They came up with the movement first. Design for actions.
Movement-based designed need not use the whole body. It need not be kinecty, non-touch. The material has a physicality.
Now we see a slide with tiny tiny words. It’s about LMA, which is Laban Movement Analysis. For doing a taxonomy of movements. They want to make expressive movement not just for dancers.
Observe movement, explore movement, devise movement, design to support the designed movement. (is this how traditional instrument makes work??)
the analysed a violinist and a no-input mixer. they made a shape change graph. There is a movement called ‘carving’ which he liked. The squeeze box uses the movement and is called ‘the twister’
They gave the prototype to a user study and told them to try moving it (with no sound). Everybody did the carving movement. People asked for buttons and accelerometers (really??)
the demo video was an artistic commission, specifically meant to be demo-y (obvs)

Questions

Laban theory is about ‘effort theory’ about the body. Did the instruments offer resistance?
They looked at interface stiffness, but decided not to focus on it. Effort describes movement dynamics, but is personal to performers.

the Prosthetic Instruments are a family of wearable instruments designed for use by dancers in a professional context. The instruments go on tour without the creators.
the piece was called ‘Les Gestes’ and was a tour in Canada. Instrument designers and composers were from McGill. The choreography and dancing was form a professional dance company in Montreal. Van Grimde Corps Secret.
there were a fuckton of people involved in the production. Lighting gesigners, costume designers, etc all had a stake in instrument design.
One of these instruments was in a concert here and was great. It looks like part of a costume.
The three instruments are called spine, ribs and visors. They are hypothetical extensions to the body. Extra limbs for your body. Dancers wear them in performance. They are removable in this context.
Ribs and Visors are extremely similar. They are touch sensitive. The spine has vertebrae connected by pvc tubing and a PET-G rod.
Professional artistic considerations – durability, usability. backups required. limiting funding and timeframes. small scale manufacturing. How are these stored and transported? what about batteries? Is there anything that needs special consideration or explanation (how to reboot).
Collaboration requires iterative design and tweaking.
Bill Buxton talks of ‘artist spec’, the most demanding standard of design. People have spent year developing a technique and your tool needs to fit in that technique.

Questions

• Why mix acrylic and pvc?
  There is a lot of stress on the instruments, so they use tough materials.
• Can you talk about the dancer’s experiences?
  The dancers did not seek technical knowledge, but they wanted to know how to experience and interact with it. They had preferences for certain instruments.

this is a video of a talk of a guy stuck in visa-hell. alas, I’ve been there.
this is for mobile phone ensembles. devices do not know each other’s physical position. so performers need not stand in a pre-arranged formation.
They play sounds at each other to measure location. This is a piece in and of itself.
They make pairwise distances and then compute three dimension position from the distances. 1 sample error is 1.5cm error. also, clock issues.
One device hears a message, the other plays sound back. They have an agreed upon delay, so as to duck the clock issue. They have an onsent detector that does fast and slow envelopes, like yesterday’s presentations. The measurements were repeatable and accurate.
They do vector matrixes to guess positions.
The ping pong notes are going along a midi score. There are some ways to recover failure.
There is geometric ambiguity. Background noise creates a problem. As do reflections. They are wondering how to solve this without restorting to harsh noise, but I say embrace it. Why not hardcore mobile phone ensembles?

Questions

Will the system work with sounds outside of the human range of hearing?
Probably not with iPhones or iPods, but it could work.
Why use the audio clock instead of the CPU clock?
the audio clock is much more reliable because its runs in real time. The CPU clock has a lot of jitter.

Use case: Lautlots
People walked around wearing headphones with a mobile phone stuck on top like extra silly cybermen.
they had six rooms, including two with position tracking. They used camera tracking in one room, and bluetooth plus a step counter in the other room.. They had LEDs on the headset for the camera tracking
He is showing a video of the walk.
they used a server/client architecture, so the server knows where everyone is. This is to prevent the guided walk from directing people to sit on each other.
Client asks for messages they want to receive.
He is showing his PD code, which makes me happy I never have to code in PD
this is also at github

Questions

What did users think of this?
Users were very happy and came out smiling.