Time To Face The Music

The area of music visualisation has always produced interesting and creative new applications of technology – from the traditional bathing of a dancefloor in pulsating psychedelia to immersive multimedia art installations. Now, however, a Japanese composer has decided that his face is the ideal visual output platform for his musical creations…

Shocking Use Of Inputs

Daito Manabe used Max/MSP to create a ‘muscle sequencer’ which outputs electrical signals triggered by his own music. He then connected a series of electrodes to his face, so that the signals would cause his facial muscles to contract – effectively giving control of his face over to the machine, and the music.

Here’s a video of the man himself – it’s a bit slow at the beginning, but as things get busier it starts to look quite weird (and possibly painful)…

When I first heard about this face/music interface, I thought that he was using his facial muscles to trigger sounds in the computer, rather than the other way around – but perhaps this is too obvious (I still think it’s an interesting idea though).

Dreams Of Electronic Bodies

Manabe is not alone in his computer-controlled-muscle exploits, however. The Institute of Artificial Art in Amsterdam (IAAA) has a department devoted to digitally-controlled human faces – fetchingly titled the ‘Department of Artifacial Expression‘.

The aim of this group is to develop “new forms of algorithmic performance art which employ the human body as a computer-controlled display device”. They are using the face as their starting point, but ultimately would envisage turning such artforms as dance into programmable events – perhaps a step-sequencer would be appropriate here. The scale and complexity of choreography enabled by this technology would probably even exceed that achieved by the Chinese.

Moving Beyond Control

The implications of such studies are both intriguing and unsettling; Kevin Kelly has been talking quite a bit about the development of the One Machine, an ubiquitous technological intelligence – but if such putative intelligence were given means to physically control humans, the consequences could be momentous. Of course, such speculation is still very much within the realm of science-fiction (for the moment), but food for thought nonetheless…