Week 3 Deepening and Narrowing

Write/Make notes about what you’ve learned.. How do your sources relate to each other? New avenues to explore.. Or settling on one…Keep observations, ideas and names that pop up in your research diary.

Make a (physical, analog) chart with the questions you have and answers so far and bring it to class. You will share it in class, and colleagues will make suggestions

Here are some critical questions to answer on the blog:
- What else is out there like it?
- How is yours different?
- How does it improve what exists?
- What audience is it for?
- What is the world/context/ market that your project lives in?
- In your initial research, have you found something you didn’t expect? Is it an interesting path to follow?
- What do you need to know about the content/story?
- What do you need from a tech standpoint?
- If it’s too much for the time.. Are there any discrete parts of it you could accomplish?

After doing first round of research on my big concept music structure and forms as well as reflecting on the similarity of projects I’ve made at ITP, I found out that my projects revolves around a common theme: music/sound and motion. Figuring out my theme is a breakthrough during my brainstorming process, it allows me to narrow down my original concept of evolving music structures to the relationship between music and structure and motion, which makes me think of the human body that generates motion but is bounded by structure.

Therefore, as my research progressed, I shifted my focus to music and body movement. Some existing projects exploring the same concept are Human Harmonic - A symphony of sound from the human body, a vinyl record that transferred medical data into a music experience of the body at work, Body Music Festival, and Body Percussion, where musicians and dancers create music by clapping, tapping different body parts. There are also countless projects using machine learning model like ml5 PoseNet or Kinect body tracking that use body as instrument to play music, examples are Above, Below and In Between, Astral Body, Body Instrument(Kinect Body Instruments), NAGUAL DANCE, Body Beat , Pose music, Posenet music, melody shapes. These projects all rely on computer, webcam/kinect and music applications like Ableton, there are certain limitations to the setup. Users have to install the computer and camera, run programs and only works in certain locations. I want to make the interaction more accessible and portable by exploring the affordance of smart phones and AR, and considering the users' surroundings as an inseparable part of the experience. It could be choreographic for dancers, or simply for fun for anyone to make music out of mundane scene. The project will live in iOS 13 with ARKit3, which enables body tracking with iPhone’s camera. In my initial research, I found an inspiring piece, The Metaphysics of Notation, a graphic score by musician Mark Applebaum, where musicians are free to interpret and improvise on what they see with their instruments, but I’m not sure yet how that would fit in to my concept. So far, I’m still exploring how to relate the structure of the body to structure of music by investigating the composition techniques of 20th century avant-garde musicians.