Åsa Unander-Scharin

The vocal chorder: empowering opera singers with a large interactive instrument

With The Vocal Chorder, a large interactive instrument to create accompaniment, opera singers can get more power over the performance. The device allows performers to interactively accompany themselves through pushing, leaning on and bending steel wires. The design was guided by the unique needs of the solo-singer, explored through autobiographical design and material explorations, some on stage, and later tested by other singers. We discuss how designing for opera and for the stage requires extraordinary durability and how opera performances can change with a bodily-oriented instrument such as The Vocal Chorder. Through a designerly exploration, we arrived at a device that offered (1) a tool for singers to take control over the rhythmical pace and overall artistic and aesthetic outcome of their performances, (2) an enriched sense of embodiment between their voice and the overall performance; and (3) a means to empower opera singers on stage.

Singing Interaction: Embodied Instruments for Musical Expression in Opera

ABSTRACT In the opera Sing the Body Electric! A Corporatorio, artists from the disciplines of opera, dance and the development of new musical instruments collaborated to create an onstage fusion of different technologies and artistic practices that connected performer, scenography and instrument. Gestures and movements of singers were captured by custom-built technologies. The singers also used custom-built technologies for transforming their vocal qualities and for creating synthesized accompaniment in real time. In this way the singers’ bodily musical processes further extended their vocal performances, rooted in operatic praxis, allowing for heightened expressivity and emergent scenic subjects.

Interacting with the vocal chorder: re-empowering the opera diva

With The Vocal Chorder, a large interactive instrument to create accompaniment, opera singers can get more power over the performance. The device allows performers to interactively accompany themselves through pushing, leaning on, and bending steel wires. The design was guided by the unique needs of the solo-singer, explored through autobiographical design and material explorations on stage, and later tested by other singers. Through our designerly exploration, we arrived at a device that offered (1) a tool for singers to appropriate and take control over the rhythmical pace and overall artistic and aesthetic outcome of their performances, (2) an enriched sense of embodiment between their voice and the overall performance; and (3) a means to empower opera singers on stage.

Uncanny materialities : Digital Strategies for Staging Supernatural Themes Drawn from Medieval Ballads

In the medieval tradition of ballads, a recurring theme is that of transformation. In a staged concert for chamber orchestra, singers and dancers called Varelser och Ballader (Beings and Ballads), we explored this theme using ballads coupled with contemporary poetry and new music. The performance made use of custom-made digital musical instruments, using video analysis and large-scale physical interfaces for transformative purposes. In this article, we describe the piece itself as well as how uncanny qualities of the digital were used to emphasize eerie themes of transformation and deception by the supernatural beings found in the medieval ballads.

Towards the development of a novel upper-body pneumatic humanoid: Design and implementation

In this article, the conceptual design of a 14 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) upper-body pneumatic humanoid is presented. The movement capabilities of this novel robotic setup are achieved via Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs), a form of actuation possessing crucial attributes for the development of biologically-inspired robots. To evaluate the feasibility of the humanoids design properties, a 5-DoF robotic arm is developed and experimentally tested, while being studied from the scope of implementing a robotic structure capable of producing smooth and human-like motion responses, while maintaining the inherent compliance provided by the PAM technology.

New Scenic Subjects: Explorations of a System of Autonomous On-Stage Observers

This paper describes a full body interactive performance system where the users interact with a set of non-human observers. An observer is a sculptural scenic presence, vaguely anthropomorphic, equipped with a camera, that analyses the movements of the users, and creates a soundscape. The observers are movable but not mobile, meaning that their placement on stage defines a set of overlapping layers of activation for the users to interact with. This work aims to answer questions on what scenic subjects emerge from interacting with the observers, what new identities and relationships are established, and how we can use emotional and scenic components of these relationships to find new expressive qualities in stage productions.

Robocygne: Dancing Life into an Animal-Human-Machine

ABSTRACT Robocygne is an artistic project that revolves around the development of a custom-built robotic bird, dancing to a remix of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The artists created the choreography through a process in which movements were danced into the robot by the choreographer’s manipulation of the bird’s limbs, by hand, to the music. To enable this multitracking procedure, the artists, in collaboration with the engineers, developed novel software that allowed overlying recording of motions in synchronization with an audio track. From an artistic perspective, the authors discuss the search for choreographic and musical qualities and emphasize how material aspects of body and technology interrelate with emotional expression in Robocygne.

The vocal chorder

Probing stamina in an interactive artifact through opera rehearsals.