Music in the Key of Life
when: 2015
what: concept, front-end, back-end
where: Music in the Key of Life, Interactive Haiku, Now Play This Festival 2016, Tribeca Film Festival 2015
with: Viktor Lanneld, ARTE, NFB
Music in the Key of Life is an interactive piece of art where all everyday objects all contain a melody. Scan everything around you, and let the music begin!
The project started out as a contribution, and was selected as one out of twelve winners, out of 162 submissions, of the “Interactive Haiku” contest presented by the National Film Board of Canada and ARTE France. The tagline was to create short (very, very short!) interactive online experiences which should inspire us to see the world we live in differently.
Our idea was simple, what if we take an ordinary object and change it’s meaning? And why not the bar code? It is present everywhere. You use it all the time. Yet, you’re hardly aware of it. We wanted to make beautiful instead of meaningful. To be able to read a bar code it must be follow the exact specifications – in contrast we made the feeling unpolished and raw. The lines are crooked, the colors are bright, the animations choppy and the sound.. Well, it‘s not perfect.
The name is, of course, an homage to Stevie Wonder!
The greatest challenge was to utilise the camera as a barcode scanner across different browsers, as well as on smartphones and tablets. Live scanning is prefered although not possible on iOS devices, instead a snap and scan alternative is used as fallback.
