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"I'm definitely interested in old ideas, like the rock concert," Crawford said. "You get up on stage and the band kind of represents the hero of everyone there." He contrasted that with the experience of watching much of contemporary electronica: "The experience of the audience member is you're looking at a dude who could be working in an office right now."
But the Air Band is less "Office Space" and more "2001: A Space Odyssey;" they use the stage, jumping and waving their futuristic instruments around to make their music. Sinnott's research in the music technology program at at New York University’s Steinhardt School taught her that performers who move around in easily-seen ways help concert-goers identify better with what's going on and with the band on stage.
Dr. Joy Hirsch, director of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research at the Neurological Institute of New York, said that the band's claims of better connecting with their audience could be at least partially partly true. "The notion that the audience might have a more 'satisfying' neurological experience watching these gross motions has some validity," Hirsch said. Watching someone else moving in a certain way -- say, pressing keys on a keyboard -- causes parts of the brain to want to mimic those motions. These excitable parts of the brain, called mirror neurons, are not yet totally understood, she said.
Electronic musicians are increasingly focusing on integrating movement and interactivity into their art, said Aleksei Stevens, associate executive director of the non-profit Electronic Music Foundation. And the tinkering of avant-garde artists often makes its way into the mainstream when pop acts, like Radiohead and Bjork, incorporate similar ideas into their songs.
"I think that Langdon looks around at the electronic music scene and wishes that it were more accessible to a general public," Stevens said. "So he tries to take the things that he finds very exciting about what we're all trying to do and put it into a form that's a little younger, a little more influenced by pop means."
At the rehearsal, the Air Band worked out six songs with the same familiar format you'd expect on a pop punk record: short, catchy tunes with sometimes nasally, sometimes shouty singing.
Robert Rowe, associate director of NYU's music technology program and Crawford's thesis adviser, is a fan of the Air Band's. "The physical gestures can be part of music making," he said. He even finds making music exclusively with GarageBand sort of dangerous. "You lose the physicality of it, which has been a critical part of music making forever," he said. (Continued)
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