How AIAIAI Turned Twerking Hips into a Booty-shaking Music Hit

Intended as a follow-up to their acclaimed Sound Taxi project, AIAIAI now 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."

You can listen to the finished track below.