SoundWave Surfing v. 2

NOTES

SoundWave Surfing is an improvised musical dance competition within a motion-activated sample remix machine that requires the integration of “musment” by “movicians” within a competitive game that is participated in by both the performers and audience. This dance participates in and celebrates some aspects of hip-hop culture through its competitive nature, its emphasis on individuality and spontaneity, the freestyle movement and vocalizations, and the sampling and overdub/remix musical structure. This dance has gone through two iterations up to now, one as a duet competition and one as a team competition. Both versions are similar in structure, with the team version involving the audience in deciding which performer or team is the winner based upon the enthusiasm of their response to the performances.

The goal of the game is both for the "movicians" to create an interesting mix of music and to gain artistic satisfaction and to have the audience agree through voice vote that their team has achieved the coolest mix of music and dance. As the emcee says to the audience in his opening script: “…you’re not judging just how good the movement is, or how good the vocals are, but how they come together in a new and innovative way.”

The rules are that each member of both teams, each comprised of three movicians, must both vocalize a completely spontaneous sonic challenge for the other team members to remix, and to ‘surf’ through the other team members’ vocalizations as they create a remix of their own. Each team takes a turn: one team performer vocalizes an improvised phrase that is recorded by the computer and immediately displayed on the screen at the rear of the stage. This recording immediately begins playing back in a long loop. What the team member records is completely spontaneous and unrehearsed. Another of the team members then enters onstage as the “surfer,” who ‘surfs’ through the sound wave and remixes a musical composition, their motion tracked by video cameras. Carrying a Wii® controller to control whether the sound is following their movement onstage, the surfer can control the position of the loop by activating the looping function with the Wii® controller and moving across from stage left to stage right, the start of the loop matching the relative position of the stage right edge of a bounding box drawn by the computer software around the image of the mover. The length of that loop is determined by the perceived width of the body to the front camera. The volume of the track is controlled by the position of the dancer upstage and downstage.