Flexible and printed electronics are popping up in many places and are catching the eye of consumers. During the recent Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, held June 22-30, 2018 in downtown Rochester, NY, concertgoers had their own opportunity to make music.
 
In this case, the music was connected by posters printed through the use of Xerox’s iGen printers, Novalia’s flexible electronics and graphic designers from Partners and Napier. The series of five posters featured circuitry that would produce sounds when the musical instruments on the posters were touched by attendees.
 
Lori Francis, director, global sponsorships, global experiential marketing for Xerox, said that Xerox is always looking for new ways to enhance the festival experience for the more than 200,000 attendees. Interactive posters were a promising idea.
 
“We began exploring the concept of interactive posters right after last year’s festival ended,” said Francis. “We worked with our creative agency, Partners and Napier, to develop the interactive musical posters that truly demonstrate the intersection of the physical and digital worlds.
 
“The posters highlight several different genres of music featured at the festival, cool, funk, groovy, jive and soul and are combined with electronic elements where you can create music by touching the guitars, keyboards or drums on each poster,” Francis added. “Once we printed the poster, we then worked with our partner, Novalia, who used their touch-sensitive soundboard technology in conjunction with the musical loops to bring the printed posters to life.”
 
Novalia’s Madeleine Kelleyannoted that the posters use Novalia’s stand-alone audio platform with conductive ink technology and micro controller, creating a capacitive touch surface.
 
“All of our tech is designed and developed by us, and we tweak it to fit all our projects,” Kelleyan said. “We designed a custom circuit for this project that allowed the designers at Partners and Napier to create beautifulgraphics that come to life on touch, triggering our music remixing platform, which enables users to explore Jazz as a genre by layering up loops, beats and one shots to create their own track.”
 
Francis said that the posters allow attendees to see and enjoy Xerox’s innovations.
  
“Now in our 10th year of sponsorship, Xerox focuses on creating awareness for Xerox innovations, to show our vibrant, connected position in the community and to allow people to interact with our brand in meaningful ways – which is exactly what they do, when they interact with the posters,” Francis said. “The iGen is an amazing digital printing platform that delivers precise, vibrant color. These posters are really eye-catching.”
   
“Xerox technology is focused on the intersection of the physical and digital worlds,” said Jeffrey Zielinski, senior production supervisor for Partners + Napier. “But that’s a pretty complex idea for Jazz Festival guests to process. We wanted to make it more accessible and relevant. A series of posters that enabled people to compose their own music through touch was the perfect medium to do that in.”
 
Zielinski noted that there were challenges, perhaps the greatest of which was actually getting people to touch the posters.
 
“The biggest challenge was the user experience,” said Zielinski. “Composing music by touching a poster isn’t an intuitive behavior, so thinking about the user was really important. What would draw them in? How do we invite them to touch the poster and make where to touch obvious without cluttering it up with lots of instructions? One of the biggest discoveries was that people instinctively tapped the poster when the technology actually responds better to a swipe.”
   
“Once the concept is developed, it comes down to putting it all together, creating a design, programming the sound and making sure it all interacts when attendees push the keyboard or guitar,” Francis observed. “Location is everything and ensuring that the posters are positioned in high traffic areas, but also in places where attendees have the ability to stop and engage, is key .”
 
Kelleyan noted that Novalia has successfully deployed its interactive technology for other festival projects, which helped with the Xerox Jazz Festival posters.
 
“Our interactive technology works really well in the experiential festival space,” she added. “We’ve created 50-foot playable walls in the street for Bud Light at SXSW, music walls in Paris for Disney’s Coco film that allowed families to remix Mexican music and hear clips from the film, as well as our Financial Superpower campaign with Capital One where our technology was implemented to help staff and customers communicate with each other about their finances. 
 
“There weren’t many challenges on our side, but we would say that the agency we worked with did a really great job of making five diverse and beautiful graphics that fitted to an identical conductive circuit design without looking samey,” Kelleyannoted.
 
Overall, judging by the interest in attendees, the poster project was a huge success, even raising money for a good cause.
 
“We have seen hundreds of attendees, stopping to interact with the posters and create their own music,” Francis said. “The festival is spread out over several blocks of Rochester, so festival goers are walking between venues and food locations and find the posters a fun way to spend time.”
 
“It went brilliantly from our side - the Xerox graphics looked great and our touch technology really brought them to life,” Kelleyansaid. “We did hear one was stolen, which we always regard as a sign of a successful project!”
 
“People were really curious, excited and engaged,” Zielinski noted. “They loved being able to create music and discover all the sounds hidden in the designs. And of course, everyone wanted their own to take home. In fact, there was so much demand to buy the posters we decided to sell them all at the end of the festival with the proceeds going to Teen Empowerment of Rochester.”