SOUND EMBODIED EXPERIMENT FOR EDUCATION

the sleeping giant

The Sleeping Giant is a collective and interactive sound experience that explores the possibilities of embodied learning through sound and digital media.
This experiment is based on sound storytelling and a dictionary of interactive gestures that the public is invited to live collectively.
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).
Gesture dictionary
5 interactive gestures with CoMo.education
Motion vocabularies and computational models capable of analyzing users' movements in real time to provide multimodal feedback.
The giant's vegetal body, embodied by the design of the soundtrack, gradually becomes this collective body formed by the participants.
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).
The Sleeping Giant during the Nuit Blanche Paris 2018 with a large audience of children and adults.
Video extract
1st experiment at Nuit Blanche Paris 2018
The complete soundtrack (French version) is there at the end of the online video at 01:24 (vimeo link). An English version will be created for the international audience in EUFONIA 2020.

Partenaires recherche
IRCAM-Centre Pompidou - équipe STMS
CRI Paris / Learning Planet Institut
CRD ENS/ENSCI-Les Ateliers