I first heard Blue Crush music at a renegade happy hard-core event held in a disused warehouse on the edge of the city. Parking on gravel under a freeway bridge, my friend and I were let in through a gap in the chain-link perimeter fence by a bouncer wearing a bright blue hooded sweatshirt. He took our payment and stamped a pattern somewhat like blueberries on the back of our wrists, and we were ready to go.
Caroline and I were very familiar with happy hard-core and its high-speed repetitive drum beats and chipmunk-style vocals, but she had said that I should really taste the innovative new Blue Crush dance experience that was a bit like happy hard-core, but created in real-time partly by using an AI system in a way that coordinated the changing auditory experience with the movements of people on the dance-floor.
Having picked up water bottles, we made our way to the back room where perhaps 50 people were dancing in the Blue Crush area. There the DJ had video cameras pointed out at the crowd, sending mesmerizing computer-annotated video to a huge projection on the wall. Somehow the system was figuring out how people were responding to the music, and sending this information to a central computer in order to modulate the ongoing form of the acoustic experience.
In this way everyone's dance movements were being fed into a process of live composing of Blue Crush. In this case it was styled on the fast drum beats of happy hard-core, but instead of a DJ picking tracks to play, everyone had some control over the way that the sounds were progressing, and this worked to amplify the emotion and feeling of elation for the people in the crowd.
← Back to index