the sleeping giant

The Sleeping Giant" tells the story of a young giant — half-giant, half-plant, who returns home after a beautiful day. Step by step, the audience participates in the giant's bedtime ritual. The story ends with the appearance of her first dream.
The Sleeping Giant consists of a linear soundtrack (voice and sound atmosphere) that support the story and sounds generated by the participants themselves through an interactive gesture system using smartphones. For this experience, we have developed in collaboration with the Sound Movement Interaction Team of IRCAM-STMS, a web-based application named "CoMo.education". This application allows connection and control of smartphones (using the CoMo-Element web technology developed by Joseph Larralde and Benjamin Matuszewski). Using gesture recognition technology based on smartphone sensors, "CoMo.education" translates specific gestures into pre-recorded sounds (granular synthesis).

During the story, the participants are invited to perform gestures that will trigger these sounds, in coherence with the actions of the giant (e.g. brushing their teeth). According to each person's gesture (captured by accelerometers and gyroscopes), a particular sound is played through the smartphone's speaker. Gradually, the group comes to form a collective body, animated and sound: that of the giant. At the heart of "The Sleeping Giant"'s narrative project is the intention to offer an immersive, sensitive and collective experience. The giant's vegetal body, embodied by the design of the soundtrack, gradually becomes this collective body formed by the participants . The sound design work thus consisted in developing a coherent sound universe between the soundtrack and the granular synthesis, but also in imagining ways to guide without constraint, while taking into account the capacities of a very young audience (from 3 years old).