Extended Reality

PhoeniX

Third prize of Graduate Research Conference in Louisiana State University

We are taking live music and dance performance to the next level, by combining it with the exploration of virtual worlds within a background narrative, where music and movement interacts in real-time with different elements in a digital environment. We want to tell a story related to the music being performed, through the exploration and interaction in a virtual world, where music and sounds are the catalysts for controlling the story and its characters, actions and environments. 

Our project addresses the ambivalent nature of good and evil. Like the mythological phoenix, a fantastic creature that lives, dies and is born again from the ashes, our project is circular in nature, an everlasting cycle of birth, death and rebirth. 

The performers (one musician and one dancer) will start their journey in a dark void, until they start playing sound and music, which triggers the creation of particles, objects and humanoid creatures in different worlds.  From here, they visit different environments, in each one of them they will face some challenges related to sound and movement, amongst the eternal fight of good versus evil. 

Environment 1: darkness, rain and chaotic lightning.

Environment 2: hell, fire, lava and damned souls

Environment 3: heaven, peacefulness, meadow with creek and flowers, heavenly creatures

The music takes the main character in a journey through these 3 environments.  

Every environment has a soundscape that accentuates the mood and theme of the place. The music performance is meant to be integrated with the soundscape in each world.

– Music performer: there is a microphone capturing the sound from the instrument, in this case a viola. The signal is sent to a Max/MSP patch that analyzes the sound in terms of frequency and amplitude. This creates some control variables that are sent via OSC to the Unreal Engine, where they change parameters of different particle systems for each world.

– Dance performer: employing cameras from cellphones, the movement of the dancer is tracked and sent to the Unreal Engine to control virtual actors, so they mimic the dancer’s movement in real time.

Irina Kruchinina

Irina Kruchinina is an interdisciplinary artist scholar whose spectacles, choreography, and installations explore poetry as the relationship between language and space as it is fulfilled in the musicality of movement. Acoustic image and archi-text-urality are the central concepts of her PhD Dissertation in Comparative Literature; they lay in the foundation to her method of performative reasoning, approach to composition, and reason to perform. She offers training in devising as research, analytic movement based on classical forms of dance, writing for artists, and intermedia interpretation. Her  sessions lead towards fully developed projects in literature, performance, and the arts. 

Roberto Mochetti

Roberto Mochetti is a viola player, teacher, arranger, and composer. Passionate about contemporary music, he has played, studied and taught in Brazil, the United States and in Denmark. Born in Brazil, Roberto started his study of  viola at the Conservatory of Amparo, where he had lessons with the professors Adriana Daldosso Belli, Elazir Martins de Lima and Valdeci Merquiori. In 2015 he completed his Bachelor degree with a scholarship at the State University of Campinas (Brazil), where he studied with Dr. Emerson De Biaggi. During this course, Roberto assisted in the research “Extended Technique For Viola: Research and Suggestions for Study of the Repertoire found at the CDMC/Unicamp Library” and “Viola XXI: Adaptation of the Violoncelo XXI for Viola”, both with support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and led by Dr. Emerson Luis de Biaggi. From 2016 to 2018, Roberto attended the Nicholls State University conservatory program to study performance and chamber music with James Alexander, as well as serve as a member of the Nicholls State University String Camerata. In 2020, Mochetti completed his M.M. at Bowling Green State University under the studio of Mr. Matthew McBride-Daline. During the course of this degree, Roberto was the section leader for the BG Philharmonia and member of the BGSU Graduate String Quartet.