For the last month, I’ve been working on the audio portion of an installation for the Elektra Festival in Montréal along with Mickaël Lafontaine. The installation, designed by Mickaël, is an interactive touchscreen experience that is a meta-installation about Cycloïd-E, which is a “kinetic polyphonic installation” also being shown at Elektra. Mickaël had elementary and high school students watch video and listen to recordings of Cycloïd-E and then write short poems about it. These poems have been split into four “thematic spaces” where people can reconstruct the poems by dragging words into place. Each “thematic space” has a theme and a unique soundscape that evokes different aspects of Cycloïd-E. The soundscapes are constructed out of bits of recordings of Cycloïd-E, recordings of the kids reading their poems, and procedurally generated audio. I used the new UGen Framework in Minim to create all of the effects and do real-time mixing and parameter control, some of which is tied directly to touchscreen input.

If you are in Montréal, you can see the installation at the Elektra Festival for free. It’s currently installed in the lobby of Usine C and can be viewed starting from 5pm, through May 7. More details are available at the Elektra site: http://www.elektramontreal.ca/2011/#/program/ENTRE_2_MONDES/