INTEL
'INTELLIGENT SOUNDS'

AWARDS

LIAA 2014 – Gold – TV/Cinema/Online Original Music
LIAA 2014 – Bronze – TV/Cinema/Online Production Design
CLIO Awards 2014 – Silver – Music Partnership
CLIO Awards 2014 – Bronze – Music Partnership
CLIO Awards 2014 – Bronze – Music Film
CLIO Awards 2014 – Bronze – Music Innovative Media
CLIO Awards 2014 – Shortlisted – Digital/Social
D&AD 2014 – Wood Pencil – Sound Design & Use of Music
Webby Awards 2014 – Honoree – Branded Content
Webby Awards 2014 – Honoree – Online Guerilla & Innovation
Webby Awards 2014 – Honoree – Branded Entertainment Short Form
One Show Interactive 2014 – Shortlisted – Sound Design
Spikes Asia 2014 – Silver – Film Craft Use of Music
Spikes Asia 2014 – Silver – Film Craft Art Direction
Spikes Asia 2014 – Bronze – Film Craft Production
AWARD 2014 – Silver – Branded Content
AWARD 2014 – Bronze – Creative Innovation
AWARD 2014 – Silver – Original Music
AWARD 2014 – Bronze – Online Film
AWARD 2014 – Finalist – Emerging Digital
AWARD 2014 – Finalist – Film Craft/Direction
Creativity – Pick of the Day
FWA – Site of the Day
Adfest 2014 – Bronze Lotus – Film Craft Sound Design
BE Awards 2014 – Gold – Best Branded Content Campaign
BE Awards 2014 – Silver – Best Entertainment
BE Awards 2014 – Shortlisted – Best Use Of Music

The tablet-controlled instruments created ranged from organic analogue percussion (a tin can, a Zippo lighter etc) to synthesized digital sounds generated by apps running on the Android tablets themselves.

THE BRIEF

Despite being the largest chip manufacturer in the world, consumer knowledge that Intel processors are now in tablet computers is almost non-existent. We needed to take this message to a young audience.

THE STRATEGY

Given the broad market sector these devices are targeted towards, we needed an idea that would appeal to a hard-to-reach millennial audience, but also prove interesting to Intel’s core fan-base, who love to ‘look under the hood’ at the technical side of Intel’s endeavours.

THE IDEA

To announce the exciting new prospect of Intel-powered tablets to the world in an interesting and shareable way, we collaborated with Australian musician and producer Flume, to create a piece of branded content that showcased the creative potential of 60 Intel-powered tablets.

The resultant collaboration led to ‘Intelligent Sounds’; a band of fully-functional tablet-powered sound and light instruments that were custom-made to perform Flume’s bespoke musical composition.

THE TECHNOLOGY

Several apps were designed from scratch to connect all the devices and bring the whole project to life, one listening for frequency and volume to react to certain triggers, one to send MIDI signals over Wi-Fi, and one to create equaliser and waveform effects on the faces of the tablets. A master app also synced all the robots to hit the right notes at the right time based on the Ableton MIDI sequence created by Flume.

Although the ‘Intelligent Sounds’ band was designed to play Flume’s track, they are capable of playing virtually any piece of music and will potentially be integrated into Flume’s live shows going forward.

FLUME

The brief to Flume was to structure the track to build from a delicate analogue intro into an epic digital crescendo, and we designed the lighting for each instrument to visually represent the sounds he created (E.g. the vocals as a medical laser shining through a frosted glass rotating in time with the vocal accents).

Quote from Flume: “I didn’t want to make it easy. I wanted to write something how I write regardless and just see how it came out. And I think it’s cooler because if that. There’s so much cool stuff… I love the challenge of writing music for a particular project and a defined theme. I find working within these boundaries inspires, rather than limits creativity.”

THE ARIA AWARDS

As a fitting end to the project, Flume, who was nominated for an unprecedented eight ARIA Awards (the Australian equivalent of The GRAMMYs) extended the piece written for the Intelligent Sounds project into a full-length track, and performed it in front of a national TV audience at the award show.

And as an added brand tie-in, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra who accompanied Flume on stage, used Intel-powered tablets to display their sheet music.

RESULTS

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