After discussions with Björk and her Musical Director Matt Robertson, it became apparent that two major factors were considered when designing the stage MIDI setup for the Biophilia Live Show.

A performance ‘in the round’ meant long distances to instruments, and a request by Björk to control her beautiful Midi triggered instruments with an iPad.

This led to the decision to use a MIDI Network around the stage with each instrument (MIDI Pipe Organs, Gameleste, Computers and iPad) having a unique address on this Network.

Björk’s Producer and Computer Music guru, Damian Taylor, had produced an ingenious MAX patch that would generate song information with a simple midi trigger.

With all instruments on the Network accessible through Logic Pro’s Environment, all we needed was an iPad Application to wirelessly trigger Damian’s Max Patch.
This message would then be passed back to the Network and onto the specific stage instruments.

Björk's choice of NASA’s revolving representation of Dark Matter scattered across the Universe added the perfect GUI, and with the introduction of CoreMIDI in iOS 4.2 we were able to create a simple iPad App that could trigger the MAX patch.
Thus giving Björk a wireless controller surface for her Biophilia performance of Dark Matter…

The FluQe Team.