"Helicanthe" is the interactive multisensory creative platform developed by ACROE integrating all the technologies created by ACROE-ICA in Grenoble:
- TELLURIS: Haptic feedback real-time simulator of virtual musical instruments
- GENESIS: Interactive software for physical modeling of virtual instruments and instrumental scenes, for sound creation and musical composition.
- Helicanthe Corolla: Immersive multi-channel sound projection
This creation tool, precise and easily programmable, allows to create virtual musical instruments, design new instrumental structures, imagine new modes of playing, generate new gesture, sound and haptic feelings and live the musical experience from the gesture to the immersive acoustical diffusion in space.
It was first installed in the Olivier Messiaen Concert Hall. Several musical artworks presented in AGORA 2019 concerts have been produced and will be broadcast on this platform.
It allows to experiment :
1 - The designing of virtual musical instruments with ACROE's GENESIS software
ACROE's approach to musical and sound creation is based on instrumentality, as well for sound synthesis as for digital sound synthesis as for its composition. This approach allows to rediscover, in the computer world, the richness and subtlety of the sounds of acoustic instruments and objects.
2 - The Real-time instrumental playing on the ACROE force feedback gestural keyboards
Force feedback gestural devices (or haptic devices) allow both to act on virtual instruments and to feel the instrument under its fingers as happens in a real instrument.
The force feedback technology developed by ACROE is designed as powerful and precise to serve the musical instrumental gesture in all its expressiveness.
It allows to play together and communicate with each other through gesture.
3 - The sound dome technology used by ACROE which consists of a set of identic speakers (10, 24 to 32), that are powerful, precise, and compact and whose distribution in space methods changes the way of listening. The audience is not in front of the loudspeakers but is immersed within them in a three-dimensional musical space. On this hardware system, Claude Cadoz has developed new spatialisation software technology based on spatialisation of instruments rather than the sounds.
"My use of the sound dome is to extend the natural spatiality of musical instruments, I model and simulate in the digital world. Thus, for example, the listener is immersed within a huge gong on which it is possible for him to play in a meticulous and very localized way." Claude Cadoz, Researcher-Composer.