Music Gestures Beatbox is an interactive performance by Grace Savage, where she drives visual and audio elaboration through hand gestures. Currently the performance is structured in three parts. The first part sees Grace free-styling and spatialising her own voice through gestures, also mapped into a drawing which informs the audience about the spatial position of the vocal sound. The visual effects are enhanced by the use of lights, which color changes at every performed gestures and brightness is established by the gestures’ strength. Grace free-syles till she is interrupted by Ella’s One note Samba (1969); from this point onwards, Grace uses Ella’s vocal materials to jam with by picking specific bits of Ella’s performance, and fading it in and out. The jam evolves into a short beatbox piece, which characterise the last part of the performance. Here Grace uses the Boss RC-505 loop station to sample and loop her own voice, and Myo armband to drive the audio and video elaboration. Music Gestures Beatbox uses the Myo armband and the Myo Mapper for mapping gesture into parameters for the visual and audio elaborations. The performance as well as the technology, which allows to bring it on stage, it’s in continuous development so stay tuned to see how far it goes.

Sunday 29th May 2016 @ Funkhaus Berlin (MTFBerlin).

Di Donato, B. and and Bullock, J., (2016) xDbox: A System for Mapping Beatboxers’ Already-Learned Gestures to Object-Based Audio Processing Parameters. Porto International Conference on Musical Gesture as Creative Interface Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, Portugal. 10.13140/RG.2.2.36716.16006.

#MTFBerlin: Announcing… Grace Savage
Groundbreaking project which transforms hand movements into musical and visual experience to be unveiled