https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eheS4Z6NikY

Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) presents a new stage production entitled ‘path’. This is a new type of concert, with Kazuhisa Uchihashi for sound performance, and UA, a female singer, for voice performance, in which sound and vision are interlocked realtime with informational media technologies. Image and light respond realtime to the sound of performance and voice, and it leads to interactions as if the whole space were playing musical instruments. Here, an unprecedented collaboration among musicians, artists, and programmers has been realized.

This is an experimental concert to test how music affects the whole space of visual expressions. Sound performance and vocal performance on the stage are data-processed and informationalised, affecting realtime visual expressions (image, color, brightness, etc.) within the parameters of the space, so that a perfect interactive stage is created. An installation (the stage is under a screen ceiling, and the audience sit around the stage) is set up in the middle of the performance space, and 27-channel speakers are placed at various places in the space. The musicians can make sound arrangements and designs in the space (area, movement, and direction) as they like, while performing the maximum 6-track sound data through the originally developed interface. In accordance with linking these sound arrangements in the space with the design of frequencies, dynamics in terms of informationalisation of live sound, media outputs such as image projection, lighting and LED lighting respond interactively, so that two performers can improvise a feast of space and sound. Through this system in which the whole space functions as a musical instrument, the musician’s thought and performance of the sound can be visually expressed.

This is an original work of YCAM made on the artist-in-residence program. YCAM InterLab is involved not only in the development of the system, program, and interface with sound position moving system, but also the overall production including concept planning, in collaboration with the invited artists.

Kazuhisa Uchihashi: guitar, daxophone, electronics and musical direction
UA: voice
Takayuki Kinsei Fujimoto: lighting and space design and programming (Dumb Type)
Masahiko Furukata: image and animation design and programming (dag – IAMAS)
Daito Manabe: interaction design and programming

Organized by Yamguchi City Foundation for Cultural Promotion
Co-organized by Yamaguchi City, the Board of Education of Yamaguchi City
Sponsorship: Roland Corporation, Audio Processing Technology
Equipment Cooperation: Color Kinetics Japan Incorporated, Vstone corporation
Technical Cooperation: Tama Tech Lab.Co., Ltd.
Producer: Kazunao Abe (YCAM)
Production: YCAM InterLab