Contact

Contact is a performance/installation of electronic music, where a set of custom instruments that are first played by Ivan Franco and later offered to the audience to invite participation and collaboration in the musical event. Contact’s meta-instruments are send data to a central software system with an algorithmic music program that creates a coherent musical output.

In “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Steven Spielberg explores the idea of music patterns to communicate with alien life. The two species are bound by the simplification of language into the common traits of musical scales and the ability to understand harmony. The goal in this piece is to challenge the spectator to be a part of the musical experimentation, by breaking formal stage boundaries and bringing the audience into the performative space. This first-hand participation in the sonic experience yields interesting results, as the audience explores their performative sensibility and music as a form of communication.

Contact premiered at Culturgest in December 2012, as part of the 27 Sentidos cycle promoted by Granular.

Credits

Artistic direction, hardware and software: Ivan Franco

Acknowledgments

Granular