What am I doing and Why?
My first interest in the people scrubber system was tying a person's motion to sound playback. I started off working with a performance using Jimi Hendrix's "Red House." I envisioned walking the song in much the same was that a guitar player might "strut" their way through a guitar solo. I picture "Red House" as a walking blues. The opening lines of the song are
There's a red house over yonder
That's where my baby lives
(or something like that)
In my mind, I saw a lone guitar player climbing up a hill to reach the house. I considered how the walking motion might be used to control the playback of a song. Originally I envisioned that the walking direction would control the direction of playback (forward / backward) and speed. After building prototypes of the system, I found that the interaction was not as engaging as I had originally hoped. Jamie and several classmates had expressed a desire to see some of the tension in the performance -- a quality which my system doesn't provide affordances for. Since my system is based on a pulley, there is not really any haptic feedback
So much of "modern" music production is done using a "time line" and loops using a tiny control surface. We edit and arrange clips of audio on flat screens using a mouse pointed. I wanted to play a bit with this metaphor and create a performative music creation environment that juxtaposes the loop metaphor with macro body movements.