An orchestra conductor’s motion constitutes a distinctive form of non-verbal communication, combining standardised instructions with personal performative variations. While conductors mostly use hand gestures and eye contact to guide the musicians, conducting is a vigorous full-body act requiring coordination and observant interaction. 

This collaboration between the teams of ECDF professors Felix Biessmann (Beuth), Berit Greinke (UdK), and Emmanuel Baccelli (FU) studied the use of e-textile sensors and gesture following technologies to track an orchestra conductor’s movements. The outcome is a tailored interactive costume which is to be used as a performative musical tool in a live performance of the Verworner-Krause-Kammerorchester. A performance by the VKKO Orchestra at the Impuls Festival on 24th October 2020 featured the interactive suit. Watch the video of the performance //here.

Team: Pauline Vierne (electronic textiles), Giorgia Petri (interaction & ML), Paul Biessmann (interaction & music), Alex Börner (tailoring & costume), Kaspar Schleiser (IoT), Claas Krause and Christopher Verworner (composition & conducting), Felix Biessmann (data science), Emmanuel Baccelli (IoT), Berit Greinke (wearable computing), Friedrich Schmidgall (hardware support).