BISoN iPad quintet to perform Nov. 5

calendar icon28 Oct 2016    

Lincoln, Neb.—The composition program in the Glenn Korff School of Music will be hosting the Boulder Image and Sound Network (BISoN) ensemble from Boulder, Colorado, on Nov. 5 Directed by Hunter Ewen, BISoN is a groundbreaking, five-member quintet that performs a wild variety of music using nothing but iPads.

BISoN will be giving a mini concert and talkback session for composition students on Saturday, Nov. 5 at 2 p.m. in Westbrook Music Building Rm. 110. The event is free and open to the public.

BISoN is a group of multimedia artists at the University of Colorado Boulder, utilizing iPads as instruments for live performance. Exploration, both artistic and technological, is the foundation of our ensemble. With every performance, they try to do a new collaboration, new technical workflow and new hardware and software set up.

BISoN is an extension of the laptop ensemble, but the use of iPads (rather than laptops) allows them a greater amount of freedom within their performances. The iPads not only have virtual buttons, knobs and sliders, where you touch it to move them, but they also have the acceleration of the iPad itself. So as people move around you can, for example, throw a sound by turning the iPad in a certain direction, or maybe turn it into a steering wheel that controls some filter or some sound. You can throw it up in the air, ring it like a bell, shake it like an Etch A Sketch, and all these movements can be programmed to do different things.

As well as acting as an artistic entity, the BISoN Ensemble acts to inform and excite people about what is possible when you combine art and technology.