AIAIAI headphones create music made by twerkers

PRESS RELEASE:

Design-led headphone company AIAIAI introduce the Real Booty Music project, an experiment that makes a new track in an unusual manner. Exploring whether it’s possible to change the perception of twerking through placing it in a technology-driven, creative context and letting the dance "do the talking", the end result is new music for the dancefloor and, of course, the headphones. Hence, Real Booty Music is a project featuring Branko from Buraka Som Sistema, Dancer, Twerk Queen Louise and the Dutch design and technology company Owow.

The overall idea was to let Branko make a new track by using the movement of buttocks to build the beat. In collaboration with the designers, utilizing a dancer as their instrument who, in turn, contributes to the creative process, Branko ultimately produced a track powered and shaped by the dancer’s booty movements. 

In the words of Owow: "The Booty Drum is a device that records movement through accelerometers attached to the dancer’s booty. These movements translate into a lot of unique velocities and directions of movement. The movements, which are being mapped into unique MIDI values through Arduino hardware and processing software, can in this way be used to trigger samples and create sounds in Ableton. As every single movement sends out a unique set of values, the dancer is able to play around with sounds."

 

Ever since 'twerking' was added to the Oxford dictionary along with ‘selfie’, this particular type of booty-shaking has seen its fair share of media limelight.  The likes of Miley Cyrus may have given twerking a somewhat dubious name, and at this stage you’d be forgiven for regarding the phenomenon as a passing fad. On the other hand, it continues to pop up in popular culture in everything from Nicki Minaj workouts and Basement Jaxx videos to Diplo and Major Lazer shows. More to the point: it places itself firmly in the rich heritage of bass-driven club culture where dancing and booty-shaking are the main event.

And so, science meets gyration, technology meets flesh and Copenhagen-based audio designers meet, well, the butt in Real Booty Music, a project that offers a fresh, creative and ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek take on the time-honored art of shaking one’s butt to a bass-heavy beat. The result is a track titled Cascavel, Portuguese for rattlesnake.

WATCH THE "REAL BOOTY MUSIC" VIDEO