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Nina: From Archive to Immersive Experience

NINA: FROM ARCHIVE TO IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE

’Nina’ is the latest installation by the EPFL+ECAL Lab and brings the iconic concerts of the world famous Montreux Jazz Festival back to life. Beyond mere transcribed memories or digitised recordings, Nina offers a truly immersive and social experience.

For fifty years, under the leadership of the EPFL Metamedia Center, concert recordings of the Montreux Jazz Festival have been archived, a resource so unique and culturally important that it is listed in the UNESCO “Memory of the World” Register. But how can this digitised heritage be brought back to life and accessed?

Following six years of research conducted by the EPFL+ECAL Lab in close cooperation with the space conception laboratory ALICE, designers, architects and engineers joined forces to create an unprecedented experience, opening up a new relationship with the recordings, the music, the artists and their stage performances. The design explores the feeling of immersion, the perception of sound and the physical dimension of the experience in order to also foster social interaction in real life.

Gallo Acoustics was privileged to be chosen to provide loudspeaker technology for the project, in the form of 12 x Gallo Micro SE speakers, a key ingredient in delivering the required high-fidelity audio experience.

“Gallo Acoustics was privileged to be chosen to provide loudspeaker
technology for the project, in the form of 12 x Gallo Micro SE speakers,
a key ingredient in delivering the required high-fidelity audio experience.”

Nomadic and compact, Nina takes the audience to the heart of the world’s largest archive of live recordings of blues, jazz and rock music.

Nina includes a virtual reality element that bears witness to the history of the Festival, echoing the adventure of the music itself – from Deep Purple (who famously wrote ”Smoke on the Water” as the concert hall burned down on Lake Geneva), to contributions by artists like Max Bill, Keith Haring and Jean Tinguely.

Nina was first unveiled to the public at the 2018 running of the Montreux Jazz Festival before going on tour, bring the delights of the Montreux Festival to a worldwide audience.

For further information about the Nina project or EPLF+ECAL visit www.epfl-ecal-lab.ch

Photo credit: Daniela & Tonatiuh / EPLF+ECAL Lab