Painter Teresa Parod and Composer and Software Developer Bill Parod work together on multi-media public art. Their work combines mural paintings with situated spatial music and sound art through Augmented Reality mobile apps.

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Crossroads is a new project to bring this approach into a gallery setting, by combining Teresa's paintings and Bill's spatial music, using their Crossroads AR mobile app.  Each Crossroads painting is paired with a small, spatial "behavioral ensemble" composed for it, and graphically represented with painting fragments of ribbons and spheres.  Listeners form ensemble combinations in the AR scene by viewing different paintings with the app's camera. The painting's associated music and graphic representations then enter to the scene, helping form the music in the interaction of ensemble groups, according to their musical behaviors.

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About the paintings

We come to crossroads all the time in our lives. When two roads intersect, they present three choices in where to go or which direction to take. That impact might be immediate or delayed, minor or profound. You make a decision which direction to go. Either direction could have been a very nice life, but we have pivotal choices. Why do we make the choices? Do we have regrets for not making a different choice? Do we think of Robert Frosts’ “The Road Not Taken”?

 

Working on Crossroads AR with Bill (my lifelong partner) is a joy and I welcome his interpretation and collaboration in this work. Bill took the shape and colors of my paintings’ roads and put them in flight and movement within the AR. We have always considered Stevie Wonder’s “Ribbon in the Sky” as “our song”. When I saw Bill’s first graphics in Crossroads AR,  I thought - these are like ribbons in the sky. They reflect and elevate the outcomes of our our lives’ choices in their more spiritual level. - Teresa Parod

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About the music

I am fortunate to be surrounded by Teresa's art and art making. Her eye for color, shape, and joy in the world surrounds me every day. I've lately been working on a music arising from the behaviors of musical characters. This approach draws much from my enjoyment of listening to birds - and witnessing the varied shapes of their daily dramas, through the passing day. So, birds inhabit this music, affecting each other and the musical characters they live with. Though the ensembles' playing is consistent with their behaviors, the overall trajectory of the music is spontaneous and fluid like the music of birds in a forest.  Because the interactions are spontaneous, the music is represented as software in a mobile app. My aim is that the vividness of the characters’ personalities emerge in their interactions, as they cross paths, change course, change attitudes, and that makes the experience one of a living music, emergent in ways both natural and surprising. - Bill Parod

 

Our hope is that by combining these works, we are vividly drawn to our own terrain of paths crossed and not, and reflect healthily on our own crossroads. 

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About the app

Crossroads AR has AR and VR views.  The AR view is for exploring the music through the paintings. The VR view is a mockup of our exhibit space at IRCAM containing all of the small ensembles and their graphics. This view offers a listening experience when the paintings or their images are not available. The music evolves generatively, but there are also a few "controls" available to the listener for interaction with these ensembles and described in the Help panel:        .

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