Dance Machine v1 starts to crawl from the lab

It may not look like much, but what you see in the photo is a big first step toward the realization of my vision for a large-scale sensing system for modern dance.

It’s 6 feet long, and contains 8 sensors. There’s a powerful infrared flood light (not shown) which keeps the sensors active, unless interrupted by the shadow of a dancer. When that happens, a trigger is sent via Ethernet to a computer running Max/MSP. If you’ve never heard of Max/MSP, it’s a build-your-own-interactove-media platform, and is stunningly powerful. To learn more, check out the Cycling74 web site.

Max allows me to route each sensor signal to a MIDI sound generator, note by note. You can control sounds created in GarageBand, Ableton Live, Logic Pro, whatever you like. You walk through the space, and the sounds happen. It’s a weird feeling, but very cool. It will get much more interesting, sonically, when I start to trigger loops and arpeggiators. That’s next.

My goal is to expand this setup to cover a 50 foot by 40 foot stage, using several hundred sensors. And in 3D (three layers of 40×50 sensor grids). With multiple dancers (16!). And I won’t stop with sounds. It’s going to trigger light cues, projections, videos, and even set movement.