Music / Compositions

Secret Garden

2011 · Installation · Interactive iPad opera/ballet

Overview: A multimedia installation recreating a contemporary version of the Eden myth in an urban environment.

Format
Interactive installation
For
Eleven iPads, headphones, central sound and control system
Music
Eleven songs and an adaptive soundscape
First shown
Phoenix, Leicester, 2011
Later shown
Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, December–January 2013/14

Credits

Music: Andrew Hugill; concept, script, design, direction and visuals: Martin Rieser; technical realisation: Jamie Shaw, Lee Scott, Agne Tilingaite, Eric Tatham; singers: Angharad Thomas, James Atherton; dancers: Brendan Handsford, Ariane Barnes.

Notes

Secret Garden was first shown at Phoenix, Leicester, and later at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, during December–January 2013/14, where it was viewed by 36,509 people. The research is described in Hugill, A. & Rieser, M. (2013) “Secret Garden”, Digital Creativity 24/3, pp. 249–252, and in a paper given at ISEA2012 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Secret Garden is an interactive iPad opera/ballet, recreating a contemporary version of the Eden myth in an urban environment. The work was conceived and developed by Martin Rieser and Andrew Hugill, from original poems by Rieser set to music by Hugill. The installation was a collaboration between Rieser, Hugill, Scott, a company of dancers, animators, programmers and technicians.

The installation comprises eleven iPads mounted in a circle, acting as virtual viewports into the “secret garden” (notionally Eden). Changing real-time 3D panoramic landscapes are combined with motion-captured avatars. The viewer’s interaction with the screens triggers songs and dance. The viewports may be experienced in any order, and users encounter 3D perspective with parallax vision-shift through manipulation of the native face-tracking features of the iPad: software detects head movements and adjusts the scene’s field of view in real time.

The music is tied to each scene and builds its layering, intensity and spatiality as more audience members interact with the work. The composition is adaptive, allowing for up to 22-part polyphony at any given moment. A granular soundscape provides general ambience. Vocal settings include treated percussion distributed through headphones using Max/MSP and Ableton Live. A communication routine encoded touch events on the devices as UDP / Open Sound Control signals and delivered them to a central management system.

Materials

Demo movies of musical interactions (these lack full spatialisation detail):

Songs

Soundscape