to Sing a Forest


concept     video     audio     musicians     dancer     technology     contact

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         Artistic concept

To Sing a forest  is an organic movement with three musicians, trees and a dancer.

Real-time interaction with living trees allows the person to be directly affected and influenced by nature. The tree's movement affect the characteristics, the direction and the spatial placing for the sound. It affects the density, tonality and the rhythm of the resulting music.
 
Each composition explores a way to directly affect the performer's improvisational style and patterns using different influence sources and media types. The tree's movements create a different improvisational environment in each piece:

Traveling – Tree harmonic array: same wind, different people, same tree. standing.
Listen, Forget, Listen – Organic shifting-drone, for a dhrupad singer.
Ground – influence a dancer using tree-controlled light and sound.
Irregularity becomes regular – acts as the only consistent non-linear beat source.


Movements are the unifying force in this performance.


 

                                                                       
 


To express these subtle movements in nature, subtle meetings occur:

__     sound
an Italian experimental dhrupad singer (Amelia Cuni) allows a tree in Italy to bend her tune with a microtonal drone.
a non-linear Israeli tabla player (Oori Shalev) allow the gentle breeze to override him.   a multi-sounding american guitarist (Seth Josel) allows a tree in Mexico to govern his sound.

__     dance
an original contemporary Japanese dancer (Junko Wada) conforms to the "danceable regions" governed by a tree in Berlin.

__     light
Computer controlled light is gently used to create visual motion and shades the movements,
creating another layer for experiencing and perceiving "flow".

__     technology
Wide array of sensing methods are used in this project in order to add "natural interaction points" into
the factors affecting the resulting art.
From the small acceleration sensor on the tip of a tree in Mexico to the one on the singer's right hand, we aim to
input as much expressions of natural movements into the computer to be mixed into the sonic and visual result.


    ..and they all interact into -one- single result.
                            a flow.     movement.


The four methods in which the tree's movements affect the performers are inter-linked between them.  convolution then happens.
 

 

 

 

By the collaboration with "the tilt" group in Berlin, we already have real-time access to three active trees:
in Florence (Italy), Berlin (Germany) and San Luis Potosi (Mexico) -
“(2006) Sotavento
.

additional related resources:      www.the-tilt.com    www.sotaventos.de  

 

Last updated:   July/2007                This website contains copyrighted material www.ooish.com