Super Colliders

Takuto Fukuda(b.1984/Japan) is a composer, sound artist and gestural controller performer. He has been exploring non-existent performances that engenders the sense of authentic performances in the age of technologically extended reality. Focusing on the vestige of performers' embodied intentionality in live concerts today, he approaches them through, among others, gestural control of music, mixed reality composition, interactive audiovisual installations and Game Pieces - compositions whose course is determined in real-time according to rules, chance operations and competitive strifes between performing opponents toward a goal. His pieces have been prized at several competitions such as Andrew Svoboda Memorial Prize(Canada), CCMC 2011(Japan), WOCMAT 2013(Taiwan) and Musica Nova 2010(Czech), selected for performance at numerous music festivals in Europe, Asia, North and South America such as Ars Electronica(Austria), ISCM World Music Days 2016(Korea) and ICMCs(Slovenia, Greece, USA), and performed at prestigious institutes such as IRCAM(France), ZKM(Germany), ina-GRM(France) and CCRMA(USA). He has been pursuing his D.Mus in composition at McGill University in Canada with Prof. Sean Ferguson, thanks to a FRQSC Doctoral Research Scholarship.

Super Colliders for three pitched instruments and a computer is an audiovisual gamified composition, in which the musicians must perform particular sounds to control their avatars which should be collided with moving blobs representing musical notes on an animated scrolling score projected on a screen. The game system of the piece features a second-order Markov chain algorithm that tailors the level of challenges posed by the computer to the performers’ competence. The algorithm learns the avatars’ behaviours in real-time during the performance, then it generates mimic behaviors of the moving squares. The optimization process aims to engender the situation of a close battle between the musicians and the computer which contributes to achieving an immersive gameplay experience for the musicians.