KIMA Voice at The Great Exhibition Road Festival

Saturday 29 June and Sunday 30 June

11.00-17.00 at the Imperial College London

Is there a link between arts engagement – like joining a choir, learning an instrument, or attending art classes – and health, loneliness or wellbeing in society? Our research suggest – Yes!

Analema Group invites the audience to explore the power of their voices together, to discover harmonies between them, thus fostering social connectedness and mental wellbeing. ‘HEartS’ project (Health, Economic, and Social Impact of the ARTs) was launched by an interdisciplinary team of performance scientists at the Centre for Performance Science (Royal College of Music and Imperial College London), public health researchers, health economist and various artistic organisations to explore the patterns of, and reasons for, artistic and cultural engagement in the UK and its health, economic and social benefits.

For the Great Exhibition Road, HEartS team is partnering up with the Analema Group – creators of the KIMA: the Voice – a participatory art piece that connects the audience to their own voice. KIMA: the Voice is a sonic and visual composition as act of co-creation, as an ‘open work’ to which everyone can contribute. Working with the raw material of the recordings of a simple sequence of sounds from the human voice and real time voice of the audience, Analema Group invites participants to start with the concrete material of pure tones and gradually explore and expand the composition by bringing their voice into the centre of mathematical structure. Each ‘vocal signature’ and its interaction with pure tones, are captured by a computer, an intelligent machine learning algorithm “trains” the system. The more vocal signatures KIMA captures, the more precise the vocal analysis and visual interpretation are. Therefore, over the course of the exhibition, the system is capable of learning to differentiate between intricate nuances of the human voice and the pure tones, thereby improving its visual response to sound by offering an increasingly more meaningful and exact visual expression of sound for its audience.

Learn more about KIMA: the Voice and Analema Group here.  Learn more about HEartS study here.

The Great Exhibition Road Festival info

Supported by Hologramica