Project

Future Music Blender

Groups

The Future Music Blender (FMB) is a totally new part of the Brain Opera, which was permanently installed in Vienna in summer 2000. The FMB is the culminating experience of the Brain Opera. Visitors will enter a second room after exploring the Brain Opera's Mind Forest. In this FMB room, they will listen to multiple music and sound samples, culled from the Mind Forest, the Internet, and a pre-processor database. Selected sounds represented as ID-tagged tokens will be submitted to a central "blender" sculpture, which will read the ID and immediately incorporate the selected sound into an active performance database. A specially adapted Sensor Chair, with a Multi-Modal Mixer (MMM) for extra left-hand control, will allow one user at a time to select sounds from the active database (organized spatially according to perceptually salient characteristics), to create musical collages by waving a hand in the air, and to mix or "blend" these sounds with MMM gestures and commands. A generative algorithm will analyze the sound collage playing at any given moment, and supplement it with an appropriate musical accompaniment. Thus, found sounds will be turned into beautiful music.