Through the power of skin-safe conductive ink, Scottish electronic artist Calvin Harris has collaborated with a team to make a synthesizer out of himself and a group of models in bikinis. That’s just fine, Calvin – now what are you going to use for your remaining two wishes?

The project is the creation of Calvin, Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon at Sony Music Entertainment, and four masters students at the Royal College of Art Industrial Design program who created the conductive ink: Bibi Nelson, Becky Pilditch, Isabel Lizardi and Matt Johnson. Johnson programmed the interface and music: two Arduinos provide the analog-to-digital connection between the ink-human circuitry and a computer. Patching environment Max/MSP then deals with the data and translates to MIDI, and musical materials are sequenced live and “performed” into Ableton Live. As seen on Engadget and sent in by a number of readers (thanks!) as well as the creative team that did it.

Team member Steve Milbourne writes us with full details and extra behind-the-scenes shots. I wanted to know how they put this together and if there were any false starts or experiments necessary to get it right. He responds:

We read about the conductive ink ‘Bare’ that the students at the RCA (Royal College of Art) had invented and we thought it was pretty cool. We wondered if we could make some kind of musical instrument from it, so we spoke to Calvin and asked him if he’d be up for collaborating.

After quite a bit of mulling over various methods of doing it, we decided to try and create a choreographed routine where people touching hands would close the circuits and trigger sounds somehow.

With the help of the guys from the RCA we began to draw a schematic for the synth, and conceptualize how it would operate, we eventually decided on a layout and that we’d control it using MIDI, by connecting the paint ‘electrodes’ to an Arduino which connects to Max/MSP. This then controls individual tracks in Ableton, and in the live mode automatically quantized them on the fly as the performance took place.

Behind the scenes it was two days of setting up, testing, and working out the routines before the day we filmed it. On the day we spent the morning letting the dancers rehearse and get the timing more or less right (so the notes were quantized into the right places at the BPM running in Ableton, a bit slower than the original track, but dancing at 140bpm was a little difficult for them!) and then we filmed several takes before we got one we were happy with.

False starts, well it took a while to get it all together. At times it seemed like it might not be completely possible. The conductive ink worked better on some people than others (due to a lot of scientific variables such as… how much salt they have in their body, how sweaty they were etc), but the RCA students went through a number of different variants of the paint to get it exactly right.

We messed around with painted pitch bends as well as ribbon controllers on peoples arms – which actually worked too, but we couldn’t fit them into the performance as they weren’t ‘quite’ reliable enough. Cool though.

As to Calvin’s other wishes.. I’m not sure what more you can ask for than a human synthesizer made up of 16 attractive girls in bikinis! ;-)

Fair enough!

In the interest of gender balance, I can think of a few female electronic artists who certainly deserve to turn the tables on the roles here, however.

The ink itself is fascinating, and winks and nods about models aside, it’s terrific to see electronics getting closer to the human body and physical movement. For more on the ink and how it’s used:

http://www.bareconductive.com/index.html

More on Calvin Harris:
http://www.calvinharris.co.uk

Photos courtesy Sony; used by permission.

From John Cage to Radiohead, there are few people in any medium so closely tied to the explorations of experimental music’s frontiers than Cunningham. To understand why music was so important to him – and electronic music in particular – we can listen to Merce himself. He explains that part of this shift in thinking about time came from the eradication of bars and beats in electronic music:

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/aspen/mp3/cunningham1.mp3

From an interview on UbuWeb.

(Thanks to Benjamin Dauer for the tip.)

That’s just one example, though; there’s quite a lot more we could talk about. I’d like to do a timeline of Merce’s significant sound collaborations and review some of the moments in electronic music history with which he was involved. On Create Digital Motion, we’ll look back at his LifeForms software and the work he did with motion. But I need your help: please send along resources you think may be helpful, any of your own experiences of the artist and his work, and other tips and questions.

On Create Digital Motion:
Remembering Merce Cunningham, Digital Motion, and Digital Portraits

Merce Cunningham Dies [New York Times ArtBeat]
Merce Cunningham Foundation

MCF and MCD will be receiving visitors today. (See site above.)

A light glows from a crowded tent. Bodies move in unison as a DJ’s head bounces up and down with the beat. And you hear – nothing?

Such is the Silent Disco, most recently staged at Tennessee’s Bonnaroo 2008 Music Festival, as seen on CDM’s events.noisepages.com. See Jason’s blog post, photos, and look at the whole festival in photos.

The trick was to provide wireless headphones, thus making a dance party for the iPod age. The result is certainly surreal, as you can see in video (watch about halfway in).

But I think the event doesn’t go far enough. How about a truly silent disco – no headphones, no sound whatsoever. Naturally, there should still be a DJ. (What are those guys really doing, anyway?) Dancers would have to synchronize on their own beat, a la the creepy hypnotic power of the “IT” in A Wrinkle in Time. (Google it.) Of course, this would be even more fantastic if you could do it at a festival, get a whole bunch of people in on the joke, and then confuse the hell out of everyone else.

Any takers? (Or maybe it’s been done before?)

Photo: Jason O’Grady.