At the CMJ Music Marathon in New York City, Neon Indian unleashed their music with a one-of-a-kind visual experience powered by Microsoft’s Kinect. As they tour the country promoting their latest album, Vega International Night School, they wanted unique visuals to go along with their music.
Alan Palomo, the creator of Neon Indian, was inspired by videos he saw online of people hacking the Kinect and he wondered if he could incorporate the Kinect technology into Neon Indian’s live shows. He was just unsure about how he would be able to use the Kinect at Neon Indian’s live shows.
With the help of Microsoft and Kamil Nawratil, of VolvoxLabs, Paloma was able to create live-action visuals using a Kinect setup that was focused on each of Neon Indian’s band members as they performed. Nawratil wanted to find a sensor that would push the envelope, he believes he found that in the Kinect.
“There’s no way you can achieve something like this without the Kinect. There are other sensors, but they can’t compare. Overall, it’s a winner.”
Here is a behind-the-scenes look at how Neon Indian used the Kinect.
Paloma was looking for a new visual experience that he could share with his audience. Paloma believes that he found this new visual experience in the Kinect:
“Since the beginning, we’ve had a lot of different permutations of the live show that involves visuals. Much of the ethos behind that is to be feeding information to the synthesizer and having it generate visuals that are corresponding with the actual movements happening in the songs. So when I heard about this opportunity to work with the Kinect, it seemed like a new iteration of that concept and something I wanted to be part of. And now the new component is we’re not just feeding information from the audio tracks, but the movement of us as performers, in reaction to the audience.”
In addition to Neon Indian’s visual performance using the Kinect, there were also other Kinect-inspired art installations and music projects featured at the CMJ Music Marathon, like DELQA, among others. Here is the end result of Neon Indian using the Kinect in its CMJ Music Marathon performance.
Buy Neon Indian’s Vega Intl. Night School ($9.99) from Groove Music
Further reading: Kinect, Microsoft, Windows 10
