This seems like agens ago now but it was only a couple of month back in May (2012) whe I was working with the good people at the Philharmonia working on the install of Universe Of Sound at the Science Museum London. Roll back to January this year and we were doing the filming for Universe of Sound at watford. After much painstaking editing, stretching, tweaking and cutting of the footage it was time to install the infrastructure for the exhibition. To explain what Universe of sound is, heres an excerpt from the website:
Conduct, play and step inside a virtual Philharmonia Orchestra, joining 132 musicians and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Orchestra’s Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor, performing one of the most spectacular pieces of music ever written. Universe of Sound is an extraordinary free interactive digital installation, allowing you to explore an orchestra from the inside out as they perform Holst’sThe Planets.
Using giant visual displays, touch screens, unconventional projecting surfaces, movement-based interaction and planetarium-style projections, you can take part as musicians, conductors, arrangers and composers. Universe of Sound has been created by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
The installation also features a new companion piece to The Planets, by composer Joby Talbot, called Worlds, Stars, Systems, Infinity.
The week started busy, and then to the middle of the week it continued busy, and nearing the end of the week and right up to the opening, it remained BUSY. Our task was to install the technical aspect of the install wich included all of the Projectors, LED screens, network/power infrastructure and construction of “The Dome” below in its flat pack state.
In addition Chris Plant was also involved creating the interactive software patch for the Conductor pods, where your hands get tracked by a Kinect camera and you try and match the movements of the conductor. Its great fun and it was nice to finally meet Chris, pictured below, patching in one of the conductor pods.
As the week progressed we continued mounting projectors, fabricating, stands and mounts for various speakers and dome additions. there was allot of network cable to terminate and general stuff to be done, so we were joined by some guys from RNSS and XLvideo for a couple of days to keep us on track. As install and construction was taking place we had a team of people still editing video and Steve was working relentlessly autoring and setting up the synchronised playback system.
I must say it wasn’t the easiest install partially as there wasn’t a huge timescale to do things and partially because we had to use the museums preferred suppliers for certain things, which on some occasions was quite frustrating. It was as always good to be working with friends which made the long days easier and we soldiered on getting things in and up intime for the opening night.
The install is currently up and running and thoroughly good way to spend a couple of hours for all ages. For a better ilustration of what the install is actually like take a look at the excerpt which was featured in Newsround a few weeks back here: UNIVERSE OF SOUND NEWSROUND
The install will run until the 27th of august at the Science Museum london.