OSESP's See The Music campaign, created by Talent Marcel in Brazil in 2019, used a sensor-equipped baton to turn Marin Alsop's conducting gestures into visual
How OSESP Made Marin Alsop's Final Baton Strokes Visible to the World
See The Music is a 2019 experiential campaign created by Talent Marcel in São Paulo, Brazil, for the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo (OSESP), in which a sensor-fitted baton captured conductor Marin Alsop's gestures during live performances and converted her movements into original visual artworks.
The campaign launched in May 2019 in Brazil as a conceptually distinctive farewell project tied to the conclusion of Marin Alsop's tenure as principal conductor of OSESP. The Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo is one of Latin America's most respected symphony orchestras, and Alsop's leadership had become synonymous with its international profile. Talent Marcel, the São Paulo-based agency, recognised that the end of that chapter presented a singular creative opportunity: to make the invisible language of orchestral conducting physically and visually legible for audiences who had never thought to look at music that way.
The mechanics of See The Music depended on a baton embedded with Bluetooth connectivity, a gyroscope, and an accelerometer, linked to custom software built from approximately 13,000 lines of code, as documented by adsoftheworld.com. As Alsop conducted compositions by Beethoven, Debussy, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, every arc and inflection of her baton was recorded in real time. That motion data was then translated by the software into visual imagery, producing artworks that mapped the physical grammar of her conducting onto a visual plane. The resulting pieces gave audiences a new way to perceive classical performance, transforming an art form often experienced only through sound into something that could be seen and studied.
The campaign was entered at Cannes Lions 2019 by Talent Marcel, São Paulo, Brazil, under the Entertainment Lions for Music, placing See The Music within a global conversation about music technology and creative innovation. It stands as a document of OSESP's ambition to expand the reach of symphonic music in Brazil and beyond.
Classical music institutions in Brazil face a structural challenge that See The Music was designed to address directly. Orchestral performance is perceived by large portions of the Brazilian public as culturally remote, demanding prior knowledge and a certain social positioning to access. OSESP, as a state-funded symphony orchestra in São Paulo, carries a mandate to serve broad public audiences, not only existing classical music communities. Talent Marcel's strategic insight was that the barrier was not sound itself but the invisibility of the interpretive craft behind it.
Brazil's live concert and events sector provides important context. ECAD, the Brazilian performing rights organisation, recorded approximately 6,600 concerts and events per month in Brazil between March and May 2019, producing average monthly collections of about R$183 million annually in public-performance rights collections, according to reporting on ECAD's own published figures. That volume signals a culturally active market, yet classical orchestral music competes within it against a vastly more popular roster of popular and regional genres. In that environment, OSESP needed a campaign that could cross genre and demographic lines.
The strategic logic of See The Music was to reframe symphonic conducting as a visual and technological spectacle rather than an acoustic one alone. By instrumentalising Marin Alsop's baton with sensor technology, Talent Marcel gave OSESP a story with genuine novelty value: the conductor as artist, her gestures as brushstrokes. Competitors in the Brazilian cultural entertainment space, including major popular music festivals and streaming-led entertainment platforms, command attention through visual and interactive experiences. See The Music met that expectation on classical music's own terms, using the conductor's physical performance as its primary creative material rather than the orchestra's sound. The campaign's entry into the Cannes Lions Entertainment Lions for Music, as documented by Reason Why and Propmark Com Br, confirmed that the strategic positioning resonated with an international creative industry audience as much as a local one.
The creative execution of See The Music rests on a precise technical and aesthetic decision: that Marin Alsop's conducting gestures, captured in real time, contain enough expressive variation to generate distinct and meaningful visual forms. That premise proved correct, and the resulting artworks carry the signature of Alsop's interpretive style as clearly as a recording carries her tempi.
The baton at the centre of the project was engineered to transmit motion data via Bluetooth, using a gyroscope and accelerometer to register the speed, direction, and arc of each conducting gesture. Custom software, comprising approximately 13,000 lines of code according to adsoftheworld.com, received that data and rendered it as visual output in real time. The compositions conducted included Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, works by Debussy, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, each producing visually distinct results that reflected the differing dynamics and phrasing of those pieces. The artworks that emerged were not abstract by accident but by algorithmic translation of physical gesture, as documented by reasonwhy.es.
The campaign was produced by Santa Transmedia. The director credited on the project is listed as 1967, with Thatiane Almeida serving as Assistant Director, as recorded by adsoftheworld.com. Direction of photography was handled by Luiz Augusto. The creative leadership at Talent Marcel included Chief Creative Officer João Livi, Creative Directors Sleyman Khodor and Rodrigo Lugato, and Interactive and Creative Director Marcello Droopy. The creative team of Paula Keller Perego, Danilo Carvalho, and Guilherme Serato shaped the experiential concept into a deliverable campaign system.
The discipline required to align a live orchestral performance with functioning motion-capture technology and real-time visual rendering, without disrupting the performance itself, represents a significant production achievement. See The Music treats the São Paulo concert stage as both laboratory and gallery, making the craft of the execution inseparable from the meaning of the campaign.
See The Music earned verified recognition at two major international and national award programmes. At Cannes Lions 2019, the campaign received a Bronze Lion in the Entertainment Lions for Music, category C02: Use of Music Technology or Innovation, entered by Talent Marcel, São Paulo, Brazil, as confirmed by reporting from reasonwhy.es, propmark.com.br, and scribd.com. At the Brasil Design Award 2020, the campaign received a Silver award in the category of Technological Innovation, as documented by propmark.com.br. These two citations represent independent, panel-judged validation of both the creative and technological dimensions of the work.
No verified audience reach, ticket sales uplift, or digital engagement metrics for See The Music are publicly available beyond those award records. What the award results do confirm is that the campaign succeeded on the criteria most directly relevant to its strategic intent. A Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions in a music technology category signals that the project was evaluated as a genuine innovation in how music is experienced, not merely as institutional marketing for OSESP. The Brasil Design Award citation reinforces that the engineering and aesthetic integration of the sensor baton and visualisation software was recognised as a designed artefact in its own right.
Clapboard rates See The Music at 76 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign with strong conceptual clarity, verified industry recognition, and a technically accomplished execution, balanced against the limited scale of a single-asset experiential project and the absence of publicly documented audience impact data. See The Music demonstrates that institutional cultural campaigns can achieve international creative authority by investing in the specificity of their subject, in this case the exact physical vocabulary of one conductor's art, rather than in broad audience appeals.
See The Music is a 2019 experiential campaign created by Talent Marcel for the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo in Brazil. A sensor-equipped baton captured conductor Marin Alsop's gestures during live performances and converted her movements into visual artworks, making the physical craft of orchestral conducting visible for the first time.
Marin Alsop conducted the performances captured in See The Music. Alsop was OSESP's principal conductor at the time, and the campaign was conceived in part as a farewell project marking the end of her leadership of the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil.
Talent Marcel embedded Marin Alsop's baton with Bluetooth, a gyroscope, and an accelerometer. The motion data fed into custom software containing approximately 13,000 lines of code, as documented by adsoftheworld.com, which translated her conducting gestures into visual artworks in real time during OSESP performances in Brazil.
See The Music won a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions 2019 in the Entertainment Lions for Music, category C02: Use of Music Technology or Innovation. The campaign was entered by Talent Marcel, São Paulo, Brazil, on behalf of OSESP, as confirmed by reasonwhy.es and propmark.com.br.
See The Music featured compositions by Beethoven, Debussy, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, conducted by Marin Alsop. Each composer's work produced visually distinct artworks, reflecting the differing dynamics and phrasing of the pieces as translated by the baton's motion-capture system and the campaign's custom software.
See The Music holds a Clapboard Score of 76 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual clarity and verified award recognition, including a Cannes Lions Bronze and a Brasil Design Award Silver, weighed against its single-asset experiential format and limited publicly available audience impact data.
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