Computer Orchestra was created in 2013 by Simon de Diesbach, Laura Perrenoud and Jonas Lacôte.
They met at Ecal, University of Art and Design of Lausanne, Switzerland, during their Bachelor in media and interaction design. This project was initially created during a workshop on music and networks given at Ecal by Andreas Gysin. It was then improved to participate to a competition called Story 2023 organized by Swissnex San Francisco in 2013 and later exhibited in various places, such as Singapour and France.
Computer orchestra is an interactive installation consisting of multiple computers. Close to a configuration of a classical orchestra, it proposes a new approach to music by allowing the user to conduct his own orchestra. Movements of his hands are recognized accurately with a Kinect connected to a center computer. It will then give instructions to a multitude of musicians screens. Screens-musicians then not only send sounds back to the conductor but also visual feedback. Each sound being played by one computer, it’s an orchestra you can walk through, that you can experience from the inside. The sound will be completely different depending where you stand in the room.
In 2015, they won the Collide@CERN residency, which is a 3 months residency at Cern allowing time and space to create a project and encounter the multi-dimensional world of particle physics. During the first two months of their residency, they had great meetings and discussions with various scientists from CERN, including their inspiration partner Veronica Bindi, who is an experimental physicist. Their research were mainly focused on the creation of the World Wide Web, the analogy between the matter of the web and the particle physics & the scientific language.
Computer Orchestra will be shown for the first time in Brazil in January 2016, thanks to Swissnex Brazil and RC4 festival.