DURHAM, N.C.—The Microsoft Kinect-powered Realiti installation, based on a song by Grimes, is one of the hottest tickets at this year's Moogfest—as much as you can consider a free attraction a hot ticket. I got to spend an hour there as part of a press preview, and heard from some of the creators.
Grimes, most notably, turns out to not have been heavily involved in this installation. The Realiti setup was built by Microsoft and Listen, a "sonic identity" firm, and as Grimes made clear on Twitter yesterday, her only involvement was in providing "stems" of her song to Moogfest.
"We're really interested in artists who are open to new experiences driven by technology, and new ways of experiencing and creating music, and...she's of the same mindset," said Steve Milton of Listen.
REALiTi Interactive PlaygroundTouch the walls of this playground to transform the song.
Posted by PCMag on Friday, May 20, 2016
That said, it's an immersive way to explore a song—as long as there aren't too many people in the room. Four Kinect sensors in the corners of the room activate 22 speakers to amplify or minimize 20 elements of Grimes' song, as a mix of the song plays continually in the background. Listeners change the music by pressing on mesh panels, which are detected by the Kinects. Different parts of the music amplify, silence themselves, or appear depending on who's positioned where.
With maybe six to eight people in the room, some can press and others can listen, which is the perfect mix. Fewer people than that, and there aren't enough to play all the corners. Too many people, and all of the song's elements are pushed to the max all the time.
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"This was really fun because part of the idea was, how do we blur that line between audience and performer?" Milton said.
This is the third iteration of the interactive music installation, Milton said—the first version involved the musician Matthew Dear, and the second worked with Floating Point. Different artists were involved to different extents; Dear was heavily involved in the design, and was excited by the possibility of artists using it, according to Milton and Amy Sorokas, director of brand studios for Microsoft. It can take a few months to "sit with the music" and about four days to set up the actual installation, they said.
"We said, how can we work with an artist and do something that's different?" said Sorokas. Giving back to the Kinect hacker community was a key element; the original code for the Matthew Dear installation is available on Github, she said.
"We wanted to kind of take something the community was already playing around with and push it even further," she said.
Check it it out in the 360-video above.