The musician Grimes (also known as Claire Boucher) makes immersive hot springs of sound that sometimes, when we're lucky, eddy off into something like pop songs. Today, the Moogfest music and technology festival announced that it will help turn one of Grimes's latest songs, REALiTi, into an interactive playground through which anyone can climb.
The REALiTi setup, powered by Microsoft's Kinect, will be one of the most prominent installations at the show and it demonstrates how Kinect, which has fallen out of the gaming community's favor, is finding new uses in other areas.
"As you push into the walls and climb on or over the divisions within the space, you're actually manipulating the sound experience," said Adam Katz, the CEO of Moogfest. "The different elements of the music are all separated, and they're attenuated by your physical body."
The interactive music setup at the show was pioneered in a three-day experiment with the musician Matthew Dear at New York's New Museum last year. According to Microsoft, the installation uses mesh fabrics that are transparent to some of Kinect's cameras but seen by others, letting the Kinect units track the fabric and the people moving them independently.
Katz said Kinect has become especially key in creating lively, interactive stage shows during performances.
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"This is a trend: musicians are much more interested in the whole performance experience, and they're working in collaboration with technologists to create a stage show that is not just a sequence of lights, but that is technology which is responding to their performance," he said.
Grimes fits the bill for this project because she's "very much involved in all parts of her project," Katz said. "She's not just a performer: she does a lot of production herself, and she brings in a group of collaborators, as well."
One of Moogfest's themes, reusing technology in unexpected ways, may presage the future of Kinect as well, especially as virtual reality and drones rely more and more on computer vision. According to MSPowerUser, researchers are finding Kinect may have a role as the eyes of self-driving cars.
The REALiTi: Inside the Music of Grimes installation will be free and open to the public on the Moogfest campus in Durham, North Carolina, from May 19-22.
Running since 2004, Moogfest is a futurist festival of avant-garde thinkers and electronic musicians, centered around the legacy of engineer and synthesizer inventor Bob Moog. This year's show involves a transhumanist satellite mogul who built a robot version of her wife (Martine Rothblatt) and the guy who popularized the term "virtual reality" (Jaron Lanier), along with musicians including Gary Numan, Laurie Anderson, Miike Snow, and Grimes. Stay tuned to PCMag for news from the show.