Mobius 8: Invisible Touch
Voracious Visuals
Hydra is great at devouring music, but it also has a voracious appetite for video. The instrument can be used to trigger, modify, and scrub video streams through Grid Pro, Motion, and Modul8 during a performance. “I compose all my video clips in Final Cut Pro,” says Laraio. “I capture the stuff with a video camera — sometimes a Panasonic HD camera or even with a still digital camera. If I’m out and I see something cool, I’ll shoot it and use it.” He fuses high-definition and standard-definition video with stills in Final Cut Pro, adding visual effects and using editing techniques to create arresting visuals. “I mix SD and HD all the time,” he says. “I don’t consider myself a video editor, but Final Cut is a great tool and it’s easy to learn. I can just sit down and do what I need to do.”
Laraio also stirs 3D visuals from Maya into the mix. “I can lay a still over a spinning 3D object, use it as a texture map,” he says.
Mixing all that video and sound on the fly requires some intense processing power. “Speed is very important in what I do,” says Laraio. “If you’re hitting a drum, you want to hear the sound right when you hit it. If you’re mixing video and sound, you want it to be synched up. So far, with the MacBook and my Mac Pro, I have plenty of headroom. There are no delays and everything runs smoothly.”
The performer even has enough juice left over to record his concerts. His Macs log every movement and its corresponding action within Logic Pro or Ableton Live. The video stream is similarly written to drives during a show. This lets Laraio analyze his performances and even jam alongside his own past solos. “I can play back what I’ve done and interact with it or play another instrument,” he says. “The possibilities are virtually limitless.”
Unchained Possibility
Laraio envisions a new realm of digital music performance. “I would like to define a space with the sensors I’m using,” he says. “Anything can move through it to make music — a dancer, a crowd, anything.” That includes nature. “I would like to take a whole outside environment and orchestrate it.
I could put a sensor on the motion of the waves, one to monitor the motion of plants and trees moving in the wind, even a photo sensor to monitor light conditions.” Sunny skies mean major keys and dark days mean minor. It’s all organic and seemingly impossible to control. But Laraio has cracked the conundrum.
“It’s like listening to music in a crowd,” he says. “You don’t actively listen to every sound around you, you pick and choose. The same concept would apply to the music a space or environment generates.” Laraio would pick and choose input streams, letting natural processes control the tune without creating an overwhelming racket.
He is working with reactive light devices, streams of light or even holograms that sense and react to a user’s touch. Imagine the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” holodeck, but without active force feedback. The artist is also doing some top-secret research and development with Cirque du Soleil. In the coming years, he plans to fuse his technological know-how with the circus’s magical performances. “They love to use technology in their shows,” he says, “but they like the technology to disappear, become more like magic, become more mysterious.” Like technology in a Cirque show, Laraio’s latest developments are shrouded in mystery. “Cirque really likes things to be a surprise,” he says.
How will Laraio use his new inventions in his live performances? “The show changes all the time,” he says. “I like to start, stop, change things, play off the audience. I don’t have a preset list of songs. I interact with my environment and create something new each time. Sometimes I have other artists on the stage with me and they influence things. It’s very spontaneous and we come up with things that you couldn’t come up with anywhere else.” Laraio wouldn’t have it any other way.
