Drosophila (for dance) was created as a result of a collaborative project between KLEM (saxophonist Iñigo Ibaibarriga), dancers Idoia Zabaleta / Leticia Morales and composer- interactive artist Ricardo Climent. It uses the old kroonde wireless sensor system (company now defunct...) mapping dancer's body movement as parameters for digital signal processing, via some max patches I wrote using OSC communication. This example shows realtime pitch-shifting of a live saxophone input signal depending on arms and legs movement.
My inspiration came from the insect drosophila melanogaster, often used by geneticists as a model organism due to its short life cycle. By analogy, this composition explores processes of mutation in the dancer Drosophila, who in the fiction narrative becomes blind after her whole genealogical genome is exposed to barbaric laboratory experiments. In the story, the fly develops hyper-acute hearing But Drosophila’s sensory super-powers turn against her. This piece is a deconstructed sonic representation of her short cycle of life. The focus of my research was to explore alternative structures, especially at micro level, and to investigate how they could result in new reconstructed scenarios with
more than one possible interesting musical outcome. To achieve this, I wanted to incorporate the performer’s choice to make real-time structural decisions, based on sonic responses to a dynamic score, which combines standard and graphical music notation. This is an ongoing research idea, which started with a previous work, Philisophiae Naturalis, and it is continuing with a recent one, Russian Disco. The computer score for Drosophila was developed in collaboration at the Kunitachi Collegue, Tokyo, in 2005 and it consists of a mosaic of pre-composed materials with live elements. It was inspired by the Kaitenzhusi restaurants, where customers can make choice of food, while samples of it pass by in a carousel. Performers can take decisions on the move, structuring the layout of the score, by selecting restricted musical choices, which ’pass by’ in real-time on a computer screen. However, materials can still be studied in advance because the amount of possibilities is heavily restricted. World premiered in 2005 in Vitoria, Bilbao and programmed at Universidad del Pais Vasco, Spain; Kunitachi Collegue, Tokyo; in 2006, 14th World Sax Congress, Slovenia; Badajoz, Spain; in 2007, Mantis Festival, UK; Sonoimagenes, Buenos Aires; VisionesSonoras, Mexico
