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The Aerial Robotic Choir – consisting of 10 drones – has been custom-built by Vincent Trichon supervised by Hedvig Kjellström. The positions of the drones and the dancer are tracked via a motion capture system. The dancer (represented by her head and hands) can dynamically apply attractive and repulsive forces to the drones to control their trajectories. 

The drones use the potential field method to fly. This  physics-based model for the drone motions adapts well to unexpected changes in the environment and lets each drone find its own path. The Aerial Robotic Choir is equipped with on-board loudspeakers that interactively play pre-composed music that is called forward by the movements of the dancer – and that is related to a background track of heavily filtered vocal sounds of Maria Callas. The overwhelming sound of five flying drones has been taken into consideration when creating the musical components.

CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPH, DANCE, INTERACTION DESIGN:
Åsa Unander-Scharin

CONCEPT, MUSIC, VOICE:
Carl Unander-Scharin

CONSTRUCTION OF DRONES AND SOFTWARE:
Vincent Trichon

ASSISTANT:
Sara Eriksson

SUPERVISION:
Prof. Hedvig Kjellström and Prof. Kia Höök

VOICE:
Maria Callas

PRODUCTION:
Royal Institute of technology KTH

PERFORMANCES:
Work-in-progress presentation in Music Tech Fest, August, Stockholm 2018
Work-in-progress presentation KTH R1, December 2018
Part of pre-presentation of ReCallas:Medea in Rijeka, Croatia, March 2019.

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