The Simon Interactive Midi “SIMeon” project is an idea to bring the sample-oriented music of Ethereal Nation to an interactive live performance.

The SIMeon RoadMap

SIMeon Dev Files

The SIMeon Manifesto: I like music, I hate boredom. Making interactive music isn’t really a new idea. I would say its a pretty old one. When I was in a regular Beatles-based four-piece band, the people on stage acted as avatars. We grooved to the music so the crowd grooved with us (hopefully). I think that’s the basic mindset of most popular musicians. But really the crowd doesn’t get anything from the band that they don’t put in. What if bands really gave the audience something. There’s usually a lot of discussion about the perfomance artists give. In pop there’s a lot of choreography, in rock there’s a lot of style, and even The Gorrilaz use literal avatars to represent themselves as neat little cartoons. But in popular music there doesn’t seem to be too much discussion about bands involving the audience beyond having them sing along.

As I began to develop Our Souls Will See Farther Than Our Eyes I tried playing at a couple open mic nights. These brief 5 min (or less) performances were bittersweet failures in my mind. Sure the crowd was jumping, dancing and generally enjoying the contrast of someone playing their computer to the usual collegiate acoustic performance. I couldn’t help think of how bored I would be if I was watching myself “play a computer” at a show. With that thought driving me, I began to brainstorm what an “interactive” Ethereal Nation performance might look like.

I arrived at SIMeon. The idea being that people in the audience are able to trigger samples by pressing buttons on the SIMON game. The basic song is still controlled by me, but in large part the community of the crowd is now able to actively participate in what they hear.

Right now I’m developing this idea with one other person. But if you happen to see this and have any ideas, suggestions, comments, or can help in any way, feel free to post a comment or two and get in touch with me.

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The SIMeon Technical Idea: The idea of SIMeon in way too simple terms is to program a PIC chip and connect it to a SIMON game. First SIMeon will give feed back through lights to users. The lights will indicate the beat and availability of samples and will be intuitive. Users can trigger any number of samples at will by pressing any combination of the four buttons on SIMeon. These samples will be controlled by a midi program (probably Ableton Live) on a computer which will assign the SIMeon triggers to the samples that will be played.