Our team would like to bring a rare piece of mid-20th century musical technology from the past and make it accessible to people today - no musical ability required! The Leslie speaker was first developed in 1941 by Donald Leslie to be used in conjunction with the Hammond Organ. His design included a pinning pair of speakers or horns to create its signature warbling sound which was meant to mimic a church or pipe organ.
One fine example of the type of sound this organ and speaker combination make is the song “Minlbelesh” by Hailu Mergia and Dahlak Band. Mergia uses this organ sound to great effect, and we would like to mimic this style. But instead of having the user play a keyboard, we would like to have them simply move their body and dance to a backing track. This would be where the Kinect comes in. By sending blob position data to MaxMSP and Ableton, we would recreate a similar sound to Mergia’s organ and pipe that back out into the Leslie speaker. We are aiming to get one of the Leslie’s from the Clive Davis Institute studios on the 5th and 6th floor. There will also be visual and projected aspect that will match the analog, wooden nature of the Leslie as exhibited here.
The musical
For the musical interaction, we will use a similar method of movement as exhibited in this musical wand that I designed last semester. As the the wand moves by certain increments, musical notes are output by the device to a software synthesizer. The notes are set to a pre-determined scale. For our project here, the movement will come in the form of a human dancing in front of a Kinect.