The title of Birgitta and Anders-Petters paper is “Embodied and Distributed Parallel DJing” and focuses on the innovative potential of including people with special needs when designing and creating cultural artifacts and activities. In the paper they argue that “…because of the users’ extreme demands and rich contribution, we ended up creating both a new genre of musical instruments and a new art form. We call this new art form Embodied and Distributed Parallel DJing, and the new genre of instruments for  Empowering Multi-Sensorial Things.” Access the Proceedings and paper here.

Here is a video that demonstrate the new practice of Embodied Parallel DJing, where Anders and Birgitta are using their whole body when cutting, scratching (DJing) together in parallel with Polly Ocean and Polly Planet on familiar music tunes that they choose with the RFID-tagged objects.

At 18.00 on Tuesday April 14th is the opening of the first public exhibition of Polly World at Kunst og Designhall HiOA (old Art Academy in St. Olavgate 32).  Polly World will also be open for visitors from 16.00 to 19.00 on Wednesday April 15, Thursday April 16 and Friday April as part of the conference “Aesthetics and Children with Special Needs“.

During the conference both RHYME member Karette Stænseth, Anders-Petter Anderssson and Birgitta Cappelen will make presentations/talks about different perspectives on RHYME, related to the conference theme.

Testing the tablet interface on an iPad.

First you choose the Polly Compose APP on your desktop. The first, Scenes & Things-screen, of three  in the APP opens (see picture to the left).
There you choose Scene (music and visuals) and Thing (Polly Ocean, Polly Fire, Polly Planet). Then hit the [play] button at the bottom (see picture left).

The second screen with the chosen thing in the middle opens (see picture in the middle). Here you can test out the and learn how to play on the thing and how it sounds, before sending the composition to be played on the physical thing at home. You build up a composition by hitting the sensors on the screen representing the sensors on the interactive physical thing. You can also specify how you want the action to be performed (fast, slow, slow etc.).  A composition is being built up and visualized over the play and send buttons at the bottom of the screen (see right upper picture).
You play your composition by hitting the [play] button. You send the composition by hitting [send], and you edit  (see left lower picture) and save and give it a name by hitting [edit] .
You can go to the first screen and choose another Scene or Thing by hitting  [back].

The sent Twitter Composition is received in the Interactive thing. In our example here Birgitta sends a Composition to Polly Planet (see picture lower right) and Polly Planet plays the music and light Composition.

In his presentation Andersson argues that music is not longer only the sound object, instrument or piece of art, but the services around it. These are services in the form of actors with characters that behave coherent as they answer back musically, take initiative and develop over time. With perspectives from drama, game theory, actor-network-theory as well as from learning theories on motivation, Andersson explores two design cases from RHYME.

MusicalFieldsForever (RHYME development team Fredrik, Birgitta and Anders-Petter) were invited to exhibit at the Musicmakers event in Berlin 14. September 2012. At the event we made and staged an installation version of Reflect. Very many people came and tested and experienced Reflect, which gave us invaluable input.
Here are some photos of Reflect at the event.

          
Video illustrations of the prototype from Vimeo

Peter Kirn wrote about it on his blogg createdigitalmusic.com

Karette Stensæth presented RHYME at the Culture and Society 2011 conference in Oslo the 14. December 2011.  The title of the lecure were  “Singing furniture – in the intersection between ICT, design and music”.  From the conference program: “Through the conference we want to show that culture is a key contributor to economic growth, health, self respect, happiness, knowledge, learning and tolerance. This challenges traditional ways of understanding cultural policy.  A modern cultural nation must invest in the world’s leading artistic achievements, make your living culture accessible to all and use culture as an effective tool to achieve important social objectives.“

The next week (Oct 24-28) the KhiO and AHO students worked together with focus on the textile qualities and created their own e-textile, embedding the sound, sensors, wire and light into the textile.

The last week they put it all together and created a new Musical Artefact based on RHYME iDevice and iPhone/iPod Touch. The workshop ended with a public presentation and an exhibition at KhiO the 4. November. The projects->