I Screen, You Screen - Interactive soundtrack

I Screen, You Screen
is a new digital filmmaking initiative here in Margaret River. The goals
of it are to stimulate and create a local film-making culture among the community. Our
first public showing is a number of 15 minute short films that will be shown
as a part of a multimedia display. This will first be seen at the Margaret
River Ag. show in November 2002.  The short films are on the theme of Transactions
and Laughter.  I get to do the interactive soundtrack for these.

What
do I mean by interactive soundtrack?  Something that visitors to the display
can change and work with.  So, I'm planning providing eith knobs and eight
switches. These will manipulate parts (loops, samples, levels, filtering
parameters) of the soundtrack components allowing the listener to make the
soundtrack sound their way.  So, I have some composition to do.  And I am
making the box with the knobs and switches.  These knobs and switches are
managed by a PIC microcontroller that will squirt out MIDI control changes
when the knobs are twiddled or switches flicked.

Note: the soundtrack is not sync'd to the films. That we will try later.

I'm composing using Propellerhead Reason -- this will allow realtime control
via MIDI, so this will be running along with the rest of the display, squirting
out music as required and as manipulated by the knobs.

Interesting, eh??