Ecce space – Amy Beeston

Concept/Direction: Maria Ines Villasmil
Choreography/Dance: Maria Ines Villasmil in collaboration with Irena Mikec
Collaborators: Katinka Marac, Ivo Bol, Amy Beeston, Rui Dias
Technical Advise/Creative Input: Kirk Woolford, Alex Shaub
Mentor: Jeroen Fabius
Many thanks to: Peter Pabon, Zlatko Baracskai, Carlos Guedes, Daniel Schorno, Beeldmedia

Presentation of a preliminary study. An experiment in creating an intelligent room/stage, able to receive verbal and visual input, process this information and act accordingly, taking human-like qualities…sensing?

My role: Developing custom-built voice recognition software, specifically a “sh” detector that allows the dancers to call silence and blackout the lights on stage. After testing several implementations that pattern-matched spectral component distributions over time, I eventually settled on using the autocorrelation function to judge the ‘quality’ of the sound between noise-like or tone-like, thus determining some measure of its periodicity or repetitiousness. Data is extrapolated from this function, local detail is smoothed (slowed down) within the variation of values, and a decision is taken at each moment to determine whether or not the detector will report that a ‘short’ and/or ‘long’ “sh” sound is being voiced at the microphone. The descriptions of ‘short’ and ‘long’ can of course be redefined to suit the sonic purposes at hand..

M. I. Villasmil, K. Marac, I. Bol, I. Micek, R. Dias, A. Beeston, K. Woolford, S. Doruff, and A. Shaub, “Ecce Space,” in Academie voor Theater en Dans, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Voice analysis for interactive dance space. 13-14 May, 2004.
[BibTeX] [link]

@inproceedings{Villasmil:2004nl,
author = {Villasmil, Maria Ines and Marac, Katinka and Bol, Ivo and Micek, Irena and Dias, Rui and Beeston, Amy and Woolford, Kirk and Doruff, Sher and Shaub, Alex},
title = {{Ecce Space}},
year = {2004},
booktitle = {{Academie voor Theater en Dans}},
address = {Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Voice analysis for interactive dance space. 13-14 May},
link = {https://avbees.com/ecce-space/},
month = may
}