Philo Tsoungu Controls Worlds with Sensory Percussion
This past June, Berlin-based drummer and Sunhouse artist Philomène Tsoungui took part in a live XR performance put together by We Love XR, an international collaborative project that explores the possibilities of extended reality. If you’ve never heard of XR before, they explain it as “a generic term for all immersive technologies—augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) plus those that are yet to be created.”
In the performance, Philo uses an acoustic kit with Sunhouse sensors, navigating through four immersive, dream-like worlds, each one created by a different CGI artist. The performance uses MIDI from Sensory Percussion to control a variety of visual elements—from beams of light in a desert, to abstract polygons exploding, to creepy eyeballs blinking—which react to her playing in real time as they surround her on the virtual stage.
About her setup for the event, Philo says, “I used Sunhouse sensors both as the MIDI trigger for the visuals but also as audio output. Meaning I triggered all of the tonal information, mostly with the pitch quantized to a scale and mapped to velocity or speed.”
This is breaking new ground both for Sensory Percussion and extended reality, and we’re excited to see where innovative artists like Philo will take it next!
Follow Philo on TikTok: @philo.tsoungui
