You’re An Instrument!: Creating active music-making experiences through worldbuilding and storytelling

Ciaran Frame; Erick Mitsak; Alon Ilsar

You’re An Instrument!: Creating active music-making experiences through worldbuilding and storytelling

Abstract:

This paper outlines the development and key discoveries relating to active audience participation within You’re an Instrument!, an immersive childrens’ theatre show that turns a planted audience member into a musical instrument. We outline the use of wireless gestural instruments in the show, exploring their novel use as hidden props and theatrical devices that help invite audience members into a fictional world. Through the creation of this fictional world, the audience members became more actively involved in music making with these devices in the last third of the show. This paper is a call for instrument designers to consider using worldbuilding and storytelling techniques to more actively engage audience members in discovering the workings of new instruments.