Dialogue (2014) for Prosthetic Spine & Cello

Dialogue
(for Cello and Prosthetic Spine)
The piece is a dialogue for cello and Max/MSP, articulated by the cellist through the Spine interface. The Spine is a custom-made prosthetic instrument worn by the cellist and developed at McGill University's IDMIL lab. The Spine tracks and reports it’s orientation and shape in real-time using inertial and magnetic-field sensing. Sensor-fusion algorithms run on-board the Spine instrument that interfaces with Max/MSP enabling the cellist real-time control and processing of variously sampled live cello. There are no pre-recorded sound files, so in essence Dialogue is a piece for solo cello. However the piece explores the dialogic relationship between the live and the digital both in terms of the physicality of performance, the structure and diffusion of the sound composition and between its embodied and disembodied elements. Dialogue, as a prose genre, was developed in Greece in the 4th century BCE, Socrates and Plato being its main exponents. Socrates famously said ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ and it is with the same intention that we examine here multiple forms of interactivity – physical, analogue and digital - within the scope of the piece.