Microsoft can rarely be associated with hip, indie or popular when it comes to brand or style, but a new collaboration with music duo Brood and Lorde may have just imbued the company with a quick shot of indie pop cred.
In the glitzy world of entertainment, often Apple product placement or use reigns supreme. Artists can be seen using MacBooks to DJ. Actors and actresses are donning iPhone or Apple ear buds in commercial or movies. But the New Zealand siblings Georgia and Caleb Nott, who make up the band Broods, chose to use Microsoft technologies to create their art.
As Billboard Music reports, “Georgia and Caleb Nott partnered with Microsoft to use the tech company’s Microsoft Band device to track Georgia’s emotions and heart rate and translate that data into geometric shapes and visuals throughout the “Heartlines” video and on their upcoming North American tour leg of their Conscious tour.”
The Heartlines video is a labor of love project starting with the Nott pair joining forces with indie pop sensation Lorde, to whom the two share a mutual interest in producer Joel Little and New Zealand heritage.
While the song originally conceived as seemingly eloquent love letter about distance and longing, Brood found themselves pitched with other various ideas and interpretations that can apply to the song visually. Among the many pitched ideas for Heartlines came Microsoft’s idea for using its Band 2 as a sensor that ties into the song’s namesake.
Heartlines isn’t Microsoft’s first foray into collaborative music projects, but it may be its most creative to date. Using the Band 2’s sensors, specifically the heart rate monitor, Brood and their producers were able to create distinct visuals that coincided with the heart rates of the singers as they shot the video.
We thought it would be cool if not only we started to tell stories about what was organically happening, but if we found artists that really wanted to collaborate with us on projects and work together to push the technology to do something new and different with it said Amy Sorokas, strategic brand director of Microsoft Band Studios. Working with Broods, and working with the Microsoft Band and thinking about how that kind of data collected from something that’s so intimate to somebody like your heartbeat and things like that, we were excited to find artists that had a reason to use that.”
The use of Microsoft’s Band 2 won’t stop at the conclusion of the video shoot either; Georgia plans to wear the Band 2 during concerts to hopefully recreate a bio-interactive performance similar to the music video. Fans of Broods will be able so unique heart rate visuals based on each performance the two have at their concerts.
We still have no idea what it’s going to be like, because every time we perform we perform differently.”
It’ll be interesting to see how more IoT and wearables play into the advancement of technology with art or vice versa, going forward.
