Performance One
The first performance of Space Rock 20XX took place on Saturday, May 22nd 2004 as part of Sonic Celluloid (PDF flyer), a unique film/video/music event from mah peeps at WNUR and Block Cinema.
The SR2KXX Team wired the custom built batch of 96 buttons to 96 different seats in the Block Cinema. The 96 seats were divided into four different "teams" and labeled red, green, blue, and yellow (see diagram). The audience was told that their buttons would control both the audio and visual elements of the experience and to watch the screen for their team's color.
The performance was divided into four stages:
Stage 1: 96 Stars-A-Singing
In the first stage, the unsuspecting audience is confronted with a grid of 96 stars (24 red, 24 green, 24 blue, and 24 yellow), each one corresponding to a specific button. With each button press, an audience member causes his or her star to expel a multitude of "stardust" particles. The more button presses, the more particles. Each button also controls a unique tone generator - holding down a button causes the frequency of the tone to rise, releasing the button causes the frequency to fall back down.
The stage quickly transformed from a rigid grid of stars to a cachophony of light and sound as everyone in the audience mercilessly mashed their buttons.
Stage 2: Rhythmic Asteriods
Obviously inspired by the classic, this stage forces the audience to stop button-mashing and focus on pressing their buttons in specific rhythms to protect the space ship from a series of incoming asteroids. As each asteriod approaches, it briefly flashes either red, green, blue, or yellow in a regular pattern. Each time an asteroid flashes a color, everyone on the corresponding team must press their button. If enough people on the team press their buttons, the space ship fires a laser at the asteroid. If the team can score three laser hits, the asteroid is destroyed. If the asteroid is not destroyed by the time it hits the ship, the team is embarrassed by their poor display of collective rhythm.
Rhythmic Asteroids turned out to be the crowd favorite. Once the audience got the hang of it, destroying the most asteroids quickly turned into a competition between the four teams. However, they were not just blowing up asteroids. It was our intent that the rhythmically flashing asteroids be used as a form of musical notation with the sounds of the asteroids, lasers, and explosions as instruments. In effect, the audience was not just playing a game, they were performing a computer conducted composition!
Stage 3: LIFE
This stage attempts to transform the audience's button presses into an interesting audio visual system. It begins with a grid of 96 gray "cells," each one corresponding to a specific audience member's button. The cells then begin flashing colors (again, red, green, blue, or yellow). If a audience member presses his/her button when his/her cell is flashing, it becomes "alive" and begins to grow in height. In between flashes, cells either die or survive, as determined by the the simple Game of Life algorithm. The longer a cell stays alive, the taller it becomes. Each living cell creates a unique sequence of sounds determined by its row, column, and height (the sound generation was largely inspired by the CAMUS cellular automata-based music generator).
Although some interesting sounds and patterns emerged during this stage, it perplexed the audience more than anything else. We'll be modifying the sound generation algorithm as well as thinking of ways to provide a better sense of feedback to the audience for our next performance.
Final Stage: The End
After several iterations of the LIFE stage, all of the cells suddenly die and the grid turns completely gray. Now, each button press plays a unique tone and removes one cell from the grid. Once enough of the cells have been removed, a message is revealed letting the audience know their mission is complete.
Photos
Robin was cool enough to put some photos she took from the performance online. She also blogged about a conversation we had regarding the first performance.
Designer's Comments
This "performance" was part of Sonic Celluloid, ostensibly an event where musicians provide a live musical accompaniment to silent films. I personally enjoyed watching the audience, who payed $8 to watch other people entertain them, become an integral part of the performance. Obviously, we wanted our audiences to be more than passive observers forced to watch the unfolding performance with little power to influence it. And while providing them with a single button to push may not be the most "liberating" thing imaginable, I like to think it was a proof-of-concept.
Much of SR2KXX was clearly inspired by "rhythm" video games like Parappa, Frequency, Rez, and Gitaroo Man. There are many interesting examples of experimental and non-traditional graphical music notation in contemporary classical/experimental music, but what's really great about these games is that they all utilize different graphical music notations designed for non-musicians. The computer does the "hard part" of playing music by keeping time, generating sounds, and providing feedback. The player is simply required to follow the simple notation provided and hit the correct buttons at the appropriate times. Remarkably, players of these games can still experience the "feeling" and satisfaction of playing music. The Rhythmic Asteroids stage of SR2KXX was a simple attempt to extend the rhythm game to an "orchestra" of 96 players.
Another key element was the use of dynamically generated graphics and sound. Although the execution was rather crude, the 96 Stars-A-Singing and LIFE stages had a synergy of graphics and sound that would have been impossible to acheive without real-time sound synthesis. Computers give us the ability to do amazing things with sound, and I'd like to see more games place the same emphasis on sound as they do graphics, instead of treating it as a secondary concern that is commonly outsourced or thrown in as an afterthought. Perhaps once sound synthesis hardware becomes more mainstream, we'll see more interesting applications in games.
After our first performance, I feel like we have an intriguing, but inchoate concept that needs refinement. Fortunately, we've gotten a lot of the technological hurdles out of the way. We have several ideas to make our button input system easier to build and more reliable. We also have a pretty solid game "engine" built with OpenGL and SuperCollider. For our next performance, we're hoping to provide a deeper experience that provides a much better sense of feedback for the audience. And it will be at least twice as weird.
Thanks and Big Ups
Thanks to the audience for being willing test subjects. Thanks to Will from the Block and Mark, Jacob, and Drew from WNUR. Big thanks to the rest of the SR2KXX team: Mustafa, Hunter, Michael, and Rob. Big ups to Kevekev and Tien-Ann for some clutch manual labor the night before the show. Extra thanks to Tien-Ann for filming the performance.
Marc Flury, May 2004