The Skype Music Room was a fully immersive music experience held at the 2014 Sasquatch Music Festival that combined original music compositions with mind-bending visual projections, enabling festivalgoers to "musicalize" themselves as both the creator and actual content at the festival. The activation was produced by We Are Listen to showcase the interactivity of Skype technology in a music festival setting.
The installation invited festivalgoers to become part of the music at Sasquatch allowing them to play and remix Skype Video Instant Messages (VIMs) of them and their friends in a fully immersive geodesic dome with 120 degrees of projection and 4-channel surround sound. Festivalgoers were invited to record VIMs of themselves from a designated Skype station outside of the dome (additionally fans from home could send theirs in via Skype). VIMs were then instantly programmed into audio/visual loops via a digital sound interface and sent inside the dome, where festivalgoers performed and manipulated the VIMs on a special sample controller. VIMs were layered atop vibrant electronic music and video art produced specifically for the experience. Visitors included special guest performances from festival acts The Lonely Forest, Foy Vance, and Cloud Control.
The Skype Music Room experience allowed festivalgoers to take the stage at Sasquatch and musicalize themselves in a fun, innovative way, while also delivering a strong brand connection showing how Skype's technology can be used to surprise, delight, and bring people together – in this case, through the joy of music and a compelling use of video content.
Going beyond the typical 4x4 festival activation and logo slapping, the Skype Music Room provided a fun, highly interactive experience for music fans at Sasquatch, successfully engaging them with the brand and its product features first hand while providing a memorable activation aligning with the unique and quirky atmosphere of the festival.
This activation strategically leveraged festival artists and Skype's technology to enable live, real-time music creation from festivalgoers in a way never experienced before at a music festival. It met the challenge of keeping strong interest from music fans across all 3 days of the event, while seamlessly integrating user-generated content from festivalgoers.
Participants were able, nearly immediately, to take video messages of themselves and their friends and then have that sound and image transform them into an interactive musical experience – with them as a the star. We were able to "musicalize" each user's performance, automatically tuning VIMs pitch to each backing track, even as tracks changed with the same set of VIMs. We did the same thing with repeated rhythms, using each track's BPM to maintain the electric energy in the experience.
The whole experience effectively allowed fans to get closer to their favorite artists while also being able to step into the spotlight on the Skype Music Room stage. Content from the event was captured and lived beyond festival walls – shared with registered users, across social channels, by the artists, press, Skype, and Sasquatch.
