Alumni Magazine - Spring 2008 - (Page 49) You Should Be Dancing Freeman takes audience participation to next level Jason Freeman has seen some phenomenal concerts, but the most memorable musical moments of his life have been when he was performing, not watching others perform. “There are great shows I’ve been to, but if I think about the truly transformative music experiences of my life, they’ve all been making music and not listening to music,” he says. With that in mind, Freeman, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s Music Technology Group, dreamed up Flock, a one-of-a-kind musical experience that forces concertgoers out of their seats and into the action. In Flock, the movements of dancers and audience members generate electronic sound, real-time video and a musical score for a saxophone quartet. As audience members, coerced and corralled by professional dancers, move across the floor of the performance space, an overhead video camera captures images of their movements for analysis by computer vision software, which calculates their locations. Based on that data, the software then generates music notation, which is read by the saxophonists on wireless displays mounted atop their instruments. “You have no idea what’s going to happen every night,” Freeman says. “One night, people broke out into ballroom dancing during the middle of a show. Another time, people were running in circles all around.” Flock not only provides a unique concert experience for its guests, it also tests the improvisational mettle of the professional saxophonists. “It’s an adventure for them,” Freeman says. “It’s something different than what they usually do. They’re not just going and playing a bunch of jazz standards or doing the normal shtick. It’s a chance to kind of explore themselves and push themselves in a new way. Musicians are always looking for a challenge.” In December, Flock — commissioned by the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami — premiered in five performances. Before going on tour, Flock had three test runs at Georgia Tech. Students “were totally into it,” Freeman says. “They’re used to more interactive contexts, because they use YouTube and Facebook and they go to dance clubs. They took to it.” When the show hit the road in Miami, it met with a bit more resistance from older audiences. “There’s always a struggle getting older people involved, but we set it up so that from the moment they walked in they had to actually cross the stage in order to get to the seats that they sat in while they were waiting for things to start,” Freeman says. “As they did, they could see on the video a dot representing them moving across and they could hear the sound that was going on. From the beginning, we encouraged this environment of exploration and showed them this was not going to be a typical concert.” The typical concert experience is exactly what Freeman is trying to avoid. Despite the popularity in recent years of social networking sites and multiplayer online gaming, both of which bring communities of people together, concert performance “is still the same old stuff,” Freeman says. “When you go to see an orchestra, you sit in your seat and you never talk to the person next to you unless you came with them. You don’t talk or do anything during the show. You have a cough drop in your mouth so that you don’t cough. There’s no engagement going on there, either peer to peer within the audience or between the audience and the people on stage,” he says. “That doesn’t really interest me anymore. My interest is in using technology to break out of those boundaries and to invite the audience to be involved in some way in shaping music and performance.” Freeman admits that it is risky pairing professional musicians with unrehearsed individuals to make music, but it’s a risk he’s willing to take. “You’re taking risks in performance, and the chances of those paying off makes it worthwhile and it makes the path to performance that much more exciting. … It’s not always perfect, and it’s not always horrible, but it’s the magic of those moments where things do come together and they really work that makes the whole thing worthwhile.” — Leslie Overman Photo: Stanley Leary Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Spring 2008 49
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