Tony Brooks Towards New Multisensory Spaces and Environments

Four Senses Concert, 2002

This important concert that took place in 2002 in the Dorothy Winstone Theatre, Auckland, New Zealand.  The four senses concert were a collaboration between Raewyn Turner (NZ) and Tony Brooks (UK).

website: link

"The ‘Four Senses’ 1999, 2002 concerts were to engage and reframe perception of music and to play with subjective experiences and simulated synesthesia. Each sensory element was constructed from information relating to the other elements. The associations and correspondences of the elements made by the audience was according to their own individual and personal experiences.
The investigations include perception, misinterpretation, fictional translations and the sensory worlds of the blind/deaf: of hearing, of breathing in, and of visualizing music.

Tony Brooks utilised sensors, software and projectors to create an interactive system capturing movement from the orchestra and translating it into painting with coloured light. In this way the orchestra conductor was able to “paint” the scene through his gestures within an interactive space. Similarly orchestra members, dancers and a special signing choir for the deaf images were blended into the backdrop in real-time such that their velocity of movement affected the color of image generation and collage composition.
Raewyn Turner interpreted the sound to colour and smell using the correspondences that she made between sound/silence and light/dark. The translations involved intuitive drawing, charts, measurements, referral to the seasonal time of harvest of aromatic plants, and an equation which produces a selection of plants from which to choose smell pitch.

The performances were an improvisation and a real - time translation of sound and the gestures of making that sound, into light and colour, and multiple layers of smell. The light collage thus created was a play of interaction between live video feeds and sensors, and coloured light pre-programmed to an interpretation of sound, each affecting the other in a dynamic visual loop. "

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