Host Your Ghosts

Anthony Marasco, Alexis Bacon, and Sandro Barros

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Host Your Ghosts is an interactive sound art installation that explores communal musicking through audience-provided audio recordings and a modified and repurposed Ouija board. At its core, Host Your Ghosts acknowledges preconceived notions about the purpose and significance of Ouija boards, but turns those notions on their head, giving participants the ability to collaboratively compose a soundscape built from the things that haunt them. The installation features two distinct opportunities for participant interaction, one decentralized from the main installation space and designed to be experienced solo, and the other designed to bring people together to perform together in a collocated space. First, the experience begins by asking attendees to record a short answer to the following prompt: "What Haunts You?" Once captured, these recordings are uploaded to a remote web server and transfered to the main show computer housed at the installation site where they are analyzed and spliced to build a series of descriptor driven corpora. Located next to the main computer is a Ouija board and a custom-made motion tracking planchette interface. A placard asks this set of participants to think about the things in their lives that haunt them, and alone or in a group, to move the planchette across the board as they feel compelled. The planchette's movements conjure sonic material from the speakers around the space, driving a collection of concatenative synthesizers pulling from the descriptor-driven corpora and adjusting parameters on audio effects to build a sonic tapestry out of the "ghosts" of unseen prior contributors.

Citation

Anthony Marasco, Alexis Bacon, and Sandro Barros. 2026. Host Your Ghosts. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20782144 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_music_40,
 abstract = {Host Your Ghosts is an interactive sound art installation that explores communal musicking through audience-provided audio recordings and a modified and repurposed Ouija board. At its core, Host Your Ghosts acknowledges preconceived notions about the purpose and significance of Ouija boards, but turns those notions on their head, giving participants the ability to collaboratively compose a soundscape built from the things that haunt them. The installation features two distinct opportunities for participant interaction, one decentralized from the main installation space and designed to be experienced solo, and the other designed to bring people together to perform together in a collocated space. First, the experience begins by asking attendees to record a short answer to the following prompt: "What Haunts You?" Once captured, these recordings are uploaded to a remote web server and transfered to the main show computer housed at the installation site where they are analyzed and spliced to build a series of descriptor driven corpora. Located next to the main computer is a Ouija board and a custom-made motion tracking planchette interface. A placard asks this set of participants to think about the things in their lives that haunt them, and alone or in a group, to move the planchette across the board as they feel compelled. The planchette's movements conjure sonic material from the speakers around the space, driving a collection of concatenative synthesizers pulling from the descriptor-driven corpora and adjusting parameters on audio effects to build a sonic tapestry out of the "ghosts" of unseen prior contributors.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {40},
 author = {Anthony Marasco and Alexis Bacon and Sandro Barros},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20782144},
 editor = {Lia Mice and Nicole Robson and Tara Pattenden},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {Installation},
 numpages = {6},
 pages = {165--170},
 presentation-video = {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-cTcdhSlPw},
 title = {Host Your Ghosts},
 track = {Music},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_music_40.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}