THE NETWORKED PERFORMANCE PROJECT FOR LO
SPECCHIO CONFUSO DALL’OMBRA OF ROBERTO
GIROLIN
Antonio Camurri, Corrado
Canepa, Paolo Coletta,
Simone Ghisio, Roberto Girolin,
Gualtiero Volpe
Casa Paganini – InfoMus Lab
University of Genova
Genova, Italy
www.casapaganini.org
www.infomus.org


1. INTRODUCTION
Communication of expressive and emotional content is a
central aspect in music performance. An open research
challenge in networked music performance is how to
communicate such expressive, emotional content to
remote audiences and performers. We carried out a
preliminary study in this direction in the framework of
the networked performance “Lo specchio confuso
dall’ombra” by Roberto Girolin, presented for the first
time at Casa Paganini, Genova, on the occasion of the
opening concert of the 8th Intl Conference on New
Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME08), June 4th,
2008. The piece consists of two separate installations,
one in the Foyer and another in the Auditorium of Casa
Paganini. The problem of remote communication and
social interaction between audience and/or performers
between the two different locations is based on the
extraction and transmission in real-time of qualitative
movement descriptors (expressive cues): the EyesWeb
XMI open software platform has been adopted for this
aims.
In “Lo specchio confuso dall’ombra” we investigate how
the sound and visual rendering of a collection of
qualitative expressive and emotional descriptors of full-
body movement and gesture of a user/performer are
perceived and understood remotely by another
user/performer and by the audience. Such descriptors
have been chosen according to theories of psychologists
[4], humanistic theories by choreographers and
researchers on human movement and gesture (e.g.,
Laban’s Theory of Effort), and results from previous
projects at our Centre (see for example [1], [2]). Sound
rendering is inspired from research on sound design and
sonification; visual rendering is inspired from research
into theories on animacy [3].
The expressive qualities from full-body movements and
gesture are extracted in real-time, and concern cues on
movement activity, contraction/expansion, symmetry,
impulsiveness, postural attitude (Camurri et al 2005).
Descriptors of the dynamic shape of such cues are also
used, as well as techniques for higher-level analysis
(Camurri et al.2008).
The following section describes the concept of “Lo
specchio confuso dell’ombra”. The piece has been
developed with the EyesWeb XMI open platform for
eXtended Multimodal Interaction (www.eyesweb.org)
and has been partially supported by the EU Culture 2007
Project CoMeDiA.
2. CONCEPT
Lo specchio confuso dall’ombra can be translated as
“The mirror confused by its shadow”: it lies between a
distributed installation and a concert, in which opposing
groups of performers in two remote places play solo or
interact.
The audience (two people at a time, one for each
installation) activates video and sound transformations,
depending on the space they occupy and their gesture.
The two installations are in the Foyer and in the
Auditorium, respectively, so the two persons from the
audience cannot see and talk to each other. Multimodal
data and expressive gesture cues are extracted in real-
time by an EyesWeb XMI patch, interacting and playing
with the electronic performer. The interaction occurs
both between the electronic performer and the two places
where the audience has access, and between the two
remote installations. There are two different levels of
intervention in the audio and video transformation:
autonomous, depending on the single person and
conditioned, depending on the behaviour and the actions
occurring in the other, separate installation.
Further, the entrance of the concert hall has
microphones, which capture words, sentences, coughs,
laughs or other noise, which are transformed in real-
time and thus entering into the piece.
Lo specchio confuso dall’ombra can’t bind the audience
to remain seated or follow a specific pattern in its
behaviour. Its duration is indefinite: it changes every
time it is performed.