Real-Time Improvisation Concert

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
with the R&D project FAST (Fast Actuators, Sensors and Transceivers) we want to improve life quality by real-time. Real-time means that technology is so fast that there are no delays recognizable. Real-time is the basis for novel and advanced applications in areas such as traffic, manufacturing, health and connectivity. Let’s give you one example: You drive with your car at a speed of 100 km/h. Within the typical reaction time of 1s, your car moves 30 m until you activate the brake. With real-time assistance systems featuring also cooperative wireless communication, this critical reaction time can be decreased down to a few milliseconds, other road-users can be warned and the traffic flow can be optimized. This makes driving saver, more convenient and more energy-efficient and paves the way for the self-driving car. Together with 80 partners (most of them from industry), we want to achieve a technological and economic breakthrough. FAST is supported by the BMBF (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) within the zwanzig20 program.
However, FAST is much more than technology, FAST is also art and culture. It is a great pleasure for me to introduce you to our current experimental project. FAST and music have lots of parallels. Also in music, real-time is mandatory. The artists have to play tunes with reaction times of a few milliseconds. By means of comic pictures illustrating FAST application scenarios and brief explications, a musician transformed the content into music. The musician has received the illustrations for the first time when starting to play the music. Hence, we call this work “real-time improvisation concert”. On one hand this kind of real-time improvisation generates maximum creativity, exciting novel points of views and vital moments which are full of spontaneity. On the other hand, this is novel, extremely difficult and risky since there are no predefined tunes. There are only a very few musicians worldwide who have the ability to meet this challenge. I’m very happy that we have inspired the great musician Andreas Scotty Böttcher for this experiment. I make a big bow to him. Based on text-based descriptions done by me, the illustrations were painted by the skilled illustrator and comic artist Yiannis Stilos.

Join our experiment and have fun!

Frank Ellinger,
Coordinator of the FAST project