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Requiem for a Bee in Beelaria
Bodily interaction course
Requiem for a Bee in Beelaria from Laura Meskanen on Vimeo.
A performance piece that visualizes the inner workings of the a dancers mind. The mind is visualized through measuring EEG of the dancer, mapped to her outline of her body using kinect tracking and movements are magnified through a MYO band which the dancer is wearing and a XYZ accelerometer in a pineapple the dancer is holding.
The story behind the dance, sounds and visuals is showing an island where bees are slowly going extinct. Everything comes together using openFrameworks and PureData.
Sequence of birds flying and trees in dystopian colours. Speed of sequence influenced by EEG values. Point cloud mesh created by kinect tracking. Mesh becomes relaxed(small size, slower steps, less color change, triangular) when dancer’s brain is relaxed and gets more dynamic(large size, faster steps, dynamic color change, line loops) according to dancer’s EEG values.
A harp melody sample is affected by the four arm movements of the dancer wearing a MYO armband. The dancer holds a pineapple to affect a beehive sound sample - the pineapple has a circuit inside with an accelerometer + Arduino Fio + battery + Xbee transmitter that sends data to a Xbee receiver in the computer. Pure Data receives the signals from the four dancer movements from the Myo Band and also receives the X, Y, Z movements of the circuit inside the pineapple. Pure Data controls the levels of reverb, filtering, vibrato,tremolo effects applied to the sounds samples. *It was difficult to control the effects parameters accurately*
