The day after finding a bus that had crahsed into a building, I found myself wandering aimlessly around London’s South Bank and found what vaguely resembled an empty orchestra pit. In fact it was a project put on by the Philharmonia Orchestra of a virtual orchestra called PLAY.orchestra.
The idea behind this was when someone sat down on one of the cubes, the appropriate instrument in the orchestra would start to play and bystanders would hear the resulting composition. Since the sound was coming from the seats themselves (all weather speaker system), a participant in this project would hear the composition from their own seat (aka themselves being the loudest etc). This installation piece was augmented by lectures, live performances and functioned as a great use of technology to broaden the appeal of a very traditional artform. The supporting website has great resources for musicians and audience members alike. The one downside was that the quality of the produced music was pretty…. well…… bad. With some sampled instruments or even decent quality synthetic ones this project would be more realistic.
Posted by Steve Mynett
Tags: Music, Pop Culture, Technology, Travel, Websites
