Host Your Ghosts: Recontextualizing the Ouija Board as a Communal NIME for Music Performance

Anthony Marasco; Alexis Bacon; Sandro Barros

Host Your Ghosts: Recontextualizing the Ouija Board as a Communal NIME for Music Performance
Image credit: Anthony Marasco; Alexis Bacon; Sandro Barros

Abstract:

Host Your Ghosts is an interactive sound art installation that explores communal musicking through audience-provided statements, a repurposed Ouija board, and a custom-made motion tracking planchette interface. At its core, the installation examines Ouija’s multifaceted legacy and asks participants to recontextualize the device’s inherent cultural and anthropological scripts. This paper details our approach to de-scripting the Ouija board, exploring its potential as a collaborative NIME that enables participants to collectively compose soundscapes built from statements about the things that haunt them.

Host Your Ghosts features two distinct opportunities for participant interaction: one isolated from the main installation space and designed to be experienced independently, and the other designed to bring people together to perform as a group in a colocated space. The piece’s performance ecosystem uses machine learning tools to analyze spoken word recordings made by individual participants, building a series of descriptor-driven corpora. The planchette’s movements across the Ouija board by groups of performers conjure musical material from a series of concatenative synthesizers and a multichannel speaker array, creating a community-driven sonic tapestry made from the “ghosts” of the unseen prior contributors.

We begin by discussing connections between our work and prior projects that focus on communal activities while reframing well-known objects and practices. We follow this with a breakdown of the installation’s different interactive phases and the programmatic inspirations behind them before outlining the technological design and implementation of the installation system.