Among young people who born in 90s have the same background of facing massive information and living in the internet world. They are quickly receiving different cultures, values, social concepts, life guidances…… I would like to explore and question the confusion, the lost, the anxiety, the decision making, the life path of our generations by rethinking the narrative of myself.
How To:
Live composing music - trigger visual and visual effects - real-time projection mapping/tracking on the performer’s face.
Audience will see visual on the performer’s face, and different visual will triggered by the live music.
Here are the several points that I would like to think and “perform”:
Growth Environment
In China, almost every year after the 1990s, there are new changes – new food, new toys, new stores, new buildings, new ideas, and the city is expanding every day. I can feel this leap so clearly since I was little, seems like the leap is a normal situation, always want to catch up new things happening in the world.
In our generation in China, most of us are the only child in family, the loneliness, and the focus of us are influencing our growth. We are having unified education, unified life path, unified clothing the in school, unified gymnastics exercise…… We are both exploring, our generation and the old generations.
Information explosion, internet society
We experienced the huge period of decline of traditional media and the rise of network media. We can get whatever of information we want, but the essential for ourself is judgment of information. The information explosion does not reduce the difficulty of information acquisition, because the noise is too high - just like people in the roaring noise is difficult to hear clearly what people around you say. Sometime we lost ourself in the ocean of information, and we are following the flow of the trends.
Culture Impact
In the past years, we are have conflict of the inside of our mind, the culture inside ourselves. In this seemingly orderly and practically chaotic contact, many people are confused: traditional and western, which one is more suitable? This cultural shock is unconscious. Make people's thinking more active and open, but also more confused and lost.
On the one hand, the old, traditional culture seems separate of our age, but we are curiously receiving the old culture from new media. On the other hand, the new, foreign culture seems impact our generation, but we heard the voice of protecting our own culture.
We follow, we lost; we lead, we empty inside.
Technical side:
Max/msp - generative sound and immersive 3D sound
TouchDesigner - live performance by generative visual and face projection mapping
Reference of Technicals
Processes:
Stage 1
Compose A Narrative Story-Telling Based Music.
Based what story I want to tell, I am going to make music by following the ABA structure and will be 3 parts.
Story line:
1. Based on the memory of my childhood, I am remaining the "Beijing-opera" and "Yangbanxi" music in my head, and I was naive and relax. So I am thinking the music will reflect that kind of feeling,
2. The confusion of myself, the lost feeling during my growing up ages. I am always confuse about what I want to do and who I am during the past years, so my music of that stage will be massy but remain hopes.
3. The future of my generation. Combining the old me, the old culture and face the bright future.
For the detailed processes, I am using ableton live and max/msp to produce the music. And using the "Matouqin", "water durm" and "erhu" traditional chinese instruments, I intend to reflect my memory of the music in my childhood. And I was using a lot of noise in the B/part 2 of music.
For the performance, I will be using ambisonic environment for playback this piece.
For the face projection mapping, I did some test by using max/msp at the very beginning. But due to the reason of unstable image and position, I decided to use openCV program and Touchdesigner software to map the face postion, and using MIDI signal communication to do the music-visual real time reactions.
