HYPERFEST

Program Notes

December 11, 2021

MIT Media Lab, 6^th floor

6-9 pm

Event Map

Final Installations and Performances from Prof. Tod Machover’s Reimagining Hyperinstruments course (MAS.825), in association with two Berklee College of Music courses - taught by Profs. Akito van Troyer and Neil Leonard - on Interactive Music and Visual Design.

INSTALLATIONS

Throughout the 6^th floor

The Twelve Mics of Christmas

The Twelve Mics of Christmas is an interactive installation composed of a Christmas tree shrouded in lights, ornaments, and a series of twelve “hyper microphones” placed upon and beneath the tree. The twelve microphones are made “hyper” through linkages to Max/MSP patches that allow for real-time vocal filtering using different effects that modify how the voice sounds, and what the voice controls. We will also be performing a Christmas medley with our hyper microphone system, using our voices to sing and ‘instrument’ a selection of beloved carols.

Alexis Hope is a post-doctoral researcher in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. She sings, plays guitar in, and writes songs for a band called Calico Beach Party!

Ana Schon is an undergraduate student majoring in Songwriting and part of the Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute at Berklee College of Music. She hails from Argentina, is fluent in three languages (Spanish, English, and German!), and is in a band called Borneo back at home!

Joanna Gerr is a Masters student in the Computer Science department at MIT. She enjoys singing, playing piano and electric bass, and making music—most recently for a video game in development with her friends!

Max Addae is a Masters student in the Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab. He is an avid singer, and loves a cappella; he currently sings with the award-winning a cappella group Upper Structure!

Texture Transmit

Texture Transmit examines the material nature of sound, and the inherent sound of physical material. A composition built of the sounds of textiles - paper and fabric - plays through an immersive environment made from those same textiles. While paths must be carved for the limited access of the physical body and similarly limited line of sight, the sound composition is able to easily pass through the obstructing panels unhindered. The composition and installation are weighted between polar ends of fabric and paper, and visitors’ motion through the installation causes the sound to remix and redistribute as each textile tries to entice with its unique transmitted sounds.

Caitlin Morris is a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab. She enjoys being a complete amateur on guitar, violin, and voice, and is perpetually fascinated by the relationship between sound, the body, and the mind.

Chelsi Cocking is a Masters student in the Future Sketches group at the MIT Media Lab. She is a product designer and new media artist with a background in computer science and user experience design. Chelsea loves being surrounded by and collaborating with the energy of creative people, regardless of their creative background; therefore she has always been enamored by the practice of musicians and music performance.

Kimaya Lecamwasam is a Masters student in the Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab. She sings, plays electric bass and guitar, and is an award-winning lyricist. She has thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to think about musical performance and the physicality of sound in a way she has not been exposed to before.

Zheng Lei is a Masters student at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is an architect and urban designer. She plays classical piano and is a rock&roll fan. Recently, she started to compose using everyday sounds found in the city and our living environment. She is particularly interested in how music, an invisible entity, can interact with the human body and the physical environment around us.

Rumble

This project blends the physical and digital soundscape by introducing interactive instruments - a series of suspended metal plates generate sounds with different objects and at the same time translate that vibration into digital signals, which will be amplified through an additional array of metal plates. Along with the physical installation, the signals received from the installations are processed by Max, Jitter and Ableton Live, and create various textures of sound and interactive visuals.

Meichun Cai is a designer and is pursuing a Masters in Design Studies and Technology at Harvard GSD. She worked on design fabrication for this project. She finds great joy in using her 8-year-old MacBook.

Li Jin is currently pursuing a graduate degree in architecture at Harvard University and has a strong background in spatial planning and fabrication. Li is enthusiastic about theater set design and loves opera. Li worked on material testing, layout planning, and fabrication of the project.

Hidekatsu Uchida is a designer and mechanical engineer, studying architecture at the Harvard GSD. He worked on project ideation and fabrication, and remarked: “I am always sleepy.”

Matthew Caren is a composer, performer, researcher, and engineer studying computer science and music at MIT. He contributed to project ideation as well as sound and interaction design. He loves food, museums, and crazy noises.

Soobin Ha is a sound designer and film composer, studying in the EPD major at Berklee and in charge of audio processing for this project. Soobin plays soccer.

Ziaire “Z” Sherman is a musician and creative artist studying EPD and Saxophone Performance at Berklee College of Music. He works as the Visual Artist in this group and his middle is Trinidad.

Maria-Elena Kaser is a singer-songwriter and producer majoring in Electronic Production and Design at Berklee with a focus on generative visual design and interactive graphics. She was a part of the team that helped with the sound processing element of the project.

Igor Vogels is a sound artist, composer, producer, and programmer studying Electronic Music Production & Design as well as Electric Bass Performance at Berklee. Contributions to Rumble are sound design and composition.

So Jung Lee is an interior designer and architect, pursuing a Master’s degree at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. She contributed to the project through ideation, prototyping and fabrication. She loves her four dogs and three cats back in Seoul.

Music Meditation

Music Meditation is a meditation space in a small room with balloons. Users will feel hugged and embraced by the light and installation. The project takes elastic sensor data as input (by users pulling and playing with the balloon strings), triggering and shaping both natural and synthetic sounds. and plays pre-recorded sounds as output. It creates a meditative ambience with a combination of sound, light and visuals.

Chenlu Wang is a Masters student in design technology at Harvard GSD and is responsible for the technical part of the design.

Wei Wu is a Masters student in design, art and public domain at Harvard and is responsible for the installation.

Jiahui Tang is a Masters student in data science at Harvard and is responsible for the exhibition form ideation.

Dissolve

This work–subtitled “The Room”–is a multimedia piece about a sense of home. It dissolves the atmospheres of Russia and South Korea through the music, using ambient sounds as well as traditional Korean beats and instruments.

Diana Shaplyka is a student of Electronic Production & Design at Berklee College of Music and created visuals that combine the color palettes inspired by both Russian and Korean cultures.

Soobin Ha is a sound designer and film composer, studying in the EPD major at Berklee and in charge of music and sound design for this project.

Hyperhand Ensemble

Inspired by the range and expressiveness of ideas we have seen in Reimagining Hyperinstruments this fall, the teaching assistants for the course worked on a project that solicited contributions from each student in the form of musical imagination and physical gesture. We asked every participant to imagine a “hyperinstrument” that they would play by moving their hands in mid-air, while optionally vocalizing a “sketch” of what such an instrument might sound like, capturing video recordings of this process. We interpreted these recordings to synthesize a rendering of each such instrument, drawing on our own experience in designing new sonic gestural interfaces. Each set of hands takes a solo, showcasing the variety of ideas we captured. Put your hands in the center, however, and we invite you to join a Hyperhand Ensemble: several of the hands play together, setting the stage for you to imagine and explore your own hyperhand instrument.

Nikhil Singh is a researcher and musician/composer, currently a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in the Opera of the Future group and a TA for Reimagining Hyperinstruments. He studied music composition, guitar, and music technology as an undergraduate at the Berklee College of Music (making this whole show a particularly fun experience), and broadly works on auditory and multimodal computation and interaction. He did the sound design for the hyperhands.

Manaswi Mishra is currently a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in the Opera of the Future group and a TA for Reimagining Hyperinstruments. He has a background in physics, signal processing and computer music and his current work explores new paradigms for bespoke AI driven musical instruments. He is often found making random bleeps and bloops with his favorite instruments - voice and streams of data. He did the interaction design for the hyperhands.

PERFORMANCES

In the Multipurpose Room at 6:30/8:00 pm

Synchronicity

Synchronicity is a multisensory experience designed to take both audience and performers through a cathartic journey into the depths of the mind. It is inspired by the shamanic rites of passage performed within various indigenous Amazonian tribes. Four performers improvise a piece using physical and virtual instruments. One additional “experiencer” sits amidst the performers wearing a specially-designed device meant to stimulate their brain’s visual cortex, creating a subjective psychedelic-like experience. These biosignals are translated into an immersive visual projection that fills the room, and that in turn serves as guidance and inspiration for the music performers. The audience enjoys both the music piece and the projected visuals, participating as witnesses and companions for the experiencer’s journey.

Javier Agüera is an impact entrepreneur and a Masters student at MIT’s IDM program. His favorite hobby is designing micro-experiences that spark magic into people’s everyday life. He is the hardware engineer and an experience designer for the Synchronicity project.

Xiaofei Hong studies MDes/Technology in Harvard’s GSD, and is a creative coder and designer. She used to hate piano but has rediscovered music which she loves to work with today. She is the immersive projection visual experience designer for the Synchronicity project.

Bilkent Samsurya studies Electronic Production & Music Production and Engineering at Berklee College of Music, and also holds an Electrical Engineering degree. He is surprisingly able to sleep with his eyes open. He is a programmer and visual designer for the Synchronicity project.

Mateo Larrea is an Ecuadorian artist and technologist pursuing his undergraduate degree at Berklee. His work is mainly focused on psychoacoustics, generative art, and VR as instruments for the exploration of perception. He is a sound designer and programmer for the Synchronicity project.

Chen Liu is currently a senior at Berklee College of Music studying Electronic Production and Design. Her main interests involve composition, interactive media, AI, blockchain, and music and audio production. She is a sound designer and programmer in the Synchronicity project.

Hidemi Akaiwa is a Japanese pianist/composer from the Berklee College of Music. She combines Japanese microtonal techniques with Western theoretical constructs using synthesizers and acoustic instruments that utilize microtonal vocabularies. She plays the keyboard/synths in the Synchronicity project.

Sarah Marie Bugeja is a Composer, Vocalist and educator from Malta. She is currently studying at the Berklee College of Music where she focuses on jazz, contemporary classical and traditional Maltese music. She is the vocalist for the Synchronicity project.

LIGHT GOLIATH

LIGHT GOLIATH is a living composition, and like all living things it must eat. Light emitted in the darkened space nourishes the piece via ethereal sonic veins. When night falls again, LIGHT GOLIATH returns with renewed, yet constantly decaying strength. Dynamic, responsive lighting is ubiquitous in live performance; it accentuates and elevates sonic experience. The audience once sought to communicate+commune with performers using lighters, now they wave cell phone flashlights. What if this tradition were an instrument?

Maximilian C Mueller is a musician and Design Engineering graduate student at Harvard.

Immersive Emotion

Immersive Emotion is centered around the concept of gestural control of spatialized sound. With the flick of the wrist, theour performer not only has control over the texture, timbre, and tone but also the three-dimensional placement of sound objects within the performance space. TheOur system allows these unique emotionally- charged sound objects to be discreetly transmitted to the loudspeakers native in audiences’ personal devices, resulting in a more intimate audience-performer relationship and extending the empathetic quality of the piece.

Mitchell McDermott will soon graduate from Berklee College of Music with a degree in Electronic Production & Design with future plans to pursue research and development of music technologies that close the gap between creators and consumers of popular media. He has served as creative director and system designer for Immersive Emotion and audio processing programmer for Concerto for Ferro-Fluid and 7-String Violin.

Diana Shaplyka is a student of Electronic Production & Design at Berklee College of Music and has had the role of designing the visuals for Immersive Emotion.

Titus Kim is pursuing a bachelor degree in Electronic Production and Design program at Berklee College of Music. He worked as Gesture Designer for this project.

Xuwei Wu is a Composer, Sound Designer and Artist and will graduate from Berklee College of Music with a degree in Electronic Production & Design at the end of 2021. She is currently researching electroacoustic compositions, music technology and multimedia works. She has served as composer, performer in Immersive Emotion and participated in Concerto for Ferrofluid and 7- String Violin.

Concerto for Ferro-Fluid and 7-String Violin

Concerto for Ferro-Fluid and 7-String Violin is a duet between a 7-String Violin and a novel instrument, in which sound is transferred from the medium of air to the magnetic field, visible through magnetic fluid that responds in real time. The Ferro-instrument has no sound of its own — rather, it captures the “voice” of whatever is played into it and allows one to freeze that sound in time and change it, using magnets to alter the quality of sound. The 7-String violin is performed by Yuval Gur and the ferro-instrument is performed by Joseph Ntaimo, in a composition by Yuval Gur.

Joseph Ntaimo is an undergraduate student at MIT studying Mechanical Engineering with a focus in Musical Robotics. He is the designer, maker, coder, and performer of the Ferro-Fluid instrument and enjoys DJing in his spare time.

Yuval Gur is soon to graduate from Berklee College of Music’s film scoring program. His visual and audio works cross various mediums and styles while engaging a wide variety of audiences around the globe. He serves as the composer and performer for Concerto for Ferro-Fluid and 7-String Violin.

Cindy Yang is a designer who majors in design technology and media at Harvard. She proposed the initial concept idea for this project, and was responsible for the visual aesthetics of the whole system.

Titus Kim is a Sound Designer pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Electronic Production and Design at Berklee College of Music. He is currently researching music technology and multimedia works. He assisted in guiding the overall vision for this project.