Biomechanical Duet

2025-07-01

Excerpt from a performance with Liliana Salazar and Ove Holmqvist at Chimerik’s Unity Consciousness 2025 festival at the Roundhouse in Vancouver.

Music and dance were once the same thing. How can we use technology to turn dancers into musicians and musicians into dancers?

In this improvisation, motion data from four Movesense sensors connected to miRack through the Holonist app. Liliana’s gestures voiced two physically modelled SWAM trumpets, while SWAM’s tenor trombone, played on a Roland Aerophone Mini over WIDI BLE MIDI through an iConnectivity A4+ interface, produced notes that interacted with the harmonic field set by the trumpets. The Eventide Qvox harmonizer was mapped to the angle of the horn, which created further brass accompaniments. A walking SWAM double bass was triggered by leg movement, and tempo was controlled by the shared average activity of all sensors, clocked via Ableton Link.

The result is not a sonification of dance but a distributed instrument in which movement, voicing, and structure are inseparable. Music and dance are once more united as one social instrument.

Socio-Spatial Computing for Soundwalks

2024-05-30

Vancouver is the birthplace of soundwalks, conceptualised by members of the World Soundscape Project, including Hildegard Westerkamp, R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax and others, in the 1970s.

In 2024, I conducted two experiments that can be thought of as soundwalks, although the non interventionism has become very much intervention due to a portable PA. Furthermore, the experience is not so much that of a soundscape but an interactive, generative score that adapts to the geospatial environment of the listeners. This is still a communal listening experience, however, and one that requires observation of the surrounding space and place. Principles of acoustic ecology are still guiding the pre composition of the adaptive score, but through the seeming magic of spatial computing, the walk becomes an exploration of public place, land ownership and land use. It is also a statement very much aligned with Situationist concepts like dérive, détournement and psychogeography.

For this interactive soundwalk in Vancouver’s Olympic Village, participants took turns carrying the system, so listening, movement and social attention became shared parts of the score.

This interactive soundwalk uses my proprietary technology, combining geospatial computing, physical computing and procedural sound synthesis. By combining concepts from human geography, such as space syntax and urban morphology, with urban musicology and musical entrainment, it becomes possible to create musical experiences that are perceptually and physically coupled with the activity of the listener and the listener’s environment. Because we have place neurons, musical memories can now be embedded in places.

In this way, the everyday act of walking becomes a purposeful psychogeographic exploration of places and spaces. Expanding on Situationist concepts such as dérive, or drift, becomes an act of reclaiming public space through artistic expression. The détournement is achieved by transforming mundane objects, such as street furniture, into playfully interactive elements of the walk. Different areas, as determined by zoning and land use, respond musically when visited, since each geospatial and socio spatial object in the dataset has been categorised according to human activity or perceptual weight.

Besides aforementioned Westerkamp and Schafer, the project stands on the shoulders of Pauline Oliveros, Bernie Krause, and Judith Becker, especially in relation to deep, ritual and everyday listening, sonic awareness and acoustic ecology, extending toward dark ecology and technoanimism. Places have a profound effect on us, but the connection between music and the place where it has been created is largely lost today, much like the connection between music and movement.

In this soundwalk, listeners become active participants through the sonification of their step rate and distance to objects and areas in the city. The environment, including the weather, provides an interactive accompaniment and the overall experience is embodied and situated, as an enactivist reaction to the currently dominant cognitivist paradigm. This autopoietic soundwalk can be conducted discreetly with headphones, or as a more radical intervention using a portable PA system, in which walking becomes an act of resistance that confronts the ways in which public space has become contested and commodified.

Social cognition and spatial cognition share some of the same processing networks. This overlap suggests a link between how we navigate physical spaces and how we navigate social environments. By tapping into this shared processing, the experience can foster a stronger sense of community and connection among participants, as they experience the city in a personal yet shared musical journey.

Walking is thus transformed into a political gesture, where rhythmanalysis turns the city not only into a backdrop but a co creator of the soundscape. Its street furniture, structures, and social dynamics are inscribed into the auditory experience. This exploration of space also interrogates the relationship between land ownership and public access. The intervention offers music as both critique and a means of reclamation.

Office Intervention @ Dutch Design Week

2020-10-01

This piece was created with Ilmatila's aerialist Ilona Jäntti for Dutch Design Week 2020, together with Holonic's Mark Hakonen Meddings.

In order to generate music from her dance, Ilona used five Movesense devices, one for each limb and one to detect posture and heart rate.

F.E.C. ALGO Project

2020-08-01

In 2020, I initiated the Algo project with choreographer Jonathan Valdivieso, Carla Lozano, Marlen Atty and Veronica Vasquez for the dance centre Fundación Espacio Creativo in Panama City.

The project, sponsored by Finnish sensor manufacturer Movesense, enabled 10 dancers around Latin America to perform remotely during the pandemic using my software application. The resulting video documentations feature the dancers in their lock up location, performing dances developed by the team, while motion data was used to generate music in real time for the dancers.

Technical implementation, choreography and interactive music produced by Ove Holmqvist and composed by Aleksandar Zecevic for Fundación Espacio Creativo, Panama, 2020.

Vibes #5: Interactive Choreography and Folk Music

2022-06-17

This work was developed as part of a Creative Europe–supported collaboration with Orbe and Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research for Vibes 5, a participatory dance project designed for communal settings and audiences of different ages. The score was built as an interactive system rather than a fixed composition, allowing musical structure to respond to participants while remaining legible, accessible, and formally coherent.

The project explored how interactive music might support non linear choreography without reducing the score to reaction or effect. I created a set of responsive musical structures that could accommodate movement, changing group formations, and varying levels of participant agency. The music was composed through an expert system I designed, using musical materials that remained clear and widely graspable in participatory settings, including polka, jig, contemporary classical minimalism, and New Orleans brass band idioms.

A central concern of the work was accessibility. The score needed to support communal dance without requiring specialist musical knowledge from participants, while still offering enough structural variation and contrast to sustain interest and shape the experience over time. Rather than treating the audience as passive recipients or as isolated controllers, the project framed participation as something collective, negotiated, and musically consequential.

Vibes premiered at Birmingham International Dance Festival and was later presented at OperaEstate Festival in Bassano del Grappa. The work formed part of a broader line of research and production around interactive scores, communal dance, and systems that reconnect music with participation, bodily movement, and social coordination.

Developed in collaboration with Orbe and Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research. Choreographic collaborators included Karen Wood, Rosemary Lee, and Scott Delahunta.

Dance performance by Anna Serra at Hangar.org in Barcelona

2019-01-01

Holonic Systems developed responsive performance and participatory music systems in which movement data shaped musical structure, synthesis behaviour, and, when relevant, DMX controlled lighting and stage effects through a shared logic. The work brought sound, bodily movement, and visual atmosphere into the same compositional framework rather than treating them as separate production layers.

Across these projects, gesture, posture, and activity levels were used as compositional inputs rather than as triggers for isolated effects. Movement could influence musical parameters such as timbre, articulation, density, and structural development, while the same contextual model informed lighting changes and stage behaviour. This made it possible to maintain coherence across media without reducing the work to simple synchronisation or spectacle.

A key concern throughout this work was legibility. In systems that span sound, performance, and lighting, mapping logic can easily disappear behind the result. Holonic Systems therefore treated clear signal paths and coherent system behaviour as part of the artistic and technical method. This body of work formed a major part of the development of Holon and Holonist, and of a broader practice of building participatory and performance oriented music systems in which adaptation remains authored, constrained, and intelligible.

Augmented Aural Reality: Music For Buildings pt. 1

2020-01-04

In this piece, GPS coordinates are used as musical events and modifiers. This marks my first foray into spatial computing, courtesy of Holonic's partnership with Bose. The Bose AR system enabled true, non optical positioning and Auditory AR, in this case gaze controlled spatial music. The old Coast Plaza Hotel seems to be haunted by John Foxx’s CR 78.