New Frontiers in Music: New Instruments
On March 21, 2006, PMP hosted “New Frontiers in Music: New Instruments” in Presser Auditorium at Settlement Music School. Four individuals—composers, performers, inventors, and engineers—discussed their work in this unusual stream of musical practice. The panel consisted of Dan Overholt, Dan Trueman, Laetitia Sonami, and Eric Singer, who also moderated the event. Approximately 25 representatives of Philadelphia’s non-profit music community were in attendance. Each panelist first discussed his or her work and then gave a demonstration on one of their instruments. Dan Overholt began. A composer, performer, and instrument builder based at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology, Overholt designs instruments and software that allow increased and innovative performance control. He expressed an interest in computer interfaces that function differently from the standard computer-keyboard-mouse configuration and focuses especially on sensor technology, in which he teaches a class at UCSB. He explained his MATRIX, an interface he built for his master’s thesis “before the movie,” consisting of a square field of vertical sensors on which a performer could lay her or his hand to manipulate sound. He also described his Graphonic Interface, a clear, Plexiglas plate on which one can write like a whiteboard. The writing is translated into sound and projected by the entire Plexiglas plate, which acts as a speaker. Finally, Overholt explained and demonstrated his Overtone Violin, an instrument shaped roughly like a violin, with a body, bridge with strings, and bow, but modified to include six strings, rather than four, and several electronic sensors. The shadows of vibrating strings are captured by optical sensors, which creates the sound; an accelerometer in a glove worn on the bow hand measures changes in gravity as the bow moves; wireless video captures additional motion. And, Overholt added, “There are knobs to control whatever you’d like.” He was able to create sounds waving the bow in the air without touching the strings of the instrument and also manipulated the speed of playback. Eric Singer complimented the design of the Overtone Violin for its ability to communicate to an audience what was actually being controlled by the player’s gestures. Such transparency, he commented, is difficult to achieve. Singer then introduced Dan Trueman, who also has a background working with string instruments, but for whom such traditional models are only jumping off points. Trueman, a professor of composition and electronic music at Princeton University, started with a performance on his Bowed Sensor Speaker Array (BoSSA), using a traditional bow with a sensor on it to play on a violin finger board that replaced strings with additional sensors. These sensors triggered prerecorded sounds—in this performance, a recording of Trueman’s wife reciting the first four lines of the “Lobster Quadrille” from Alice in Wonderland. Depending on the direction he bowed, the recordings played forward or back. The poetry recitation combined with a virtual bamboo instrument, all of which played through a spherical speaker that Trueman had designed to imitate the resonance of traditional instruments. He sought, he said, “a sense of presence and intimacy” and “acoustic engagement” with other instruments. The instrument, he explained, has no particular sound and could be configured to process PMP 44
the performance of another player. In order to build the speakers, he and his colleagues had studied the radiative properties of various traditional instruments and had actually built a database of these properties. Trueman then went on to discuss the Princeton Laptop Orchesta he co-founded, and communicated the challenge of writing for the group as a composer, how to identify and work with what the performers could actually do. (PMP later took a group PLOrk’s concert on April 4—see page 46.) Laetitia Sonami, who currently teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, is an electronic composer, performer and sound installation artist focused on translating objects and movements into sound. She brought her Lady’s Glove, the invention for which she is best known. This glove is the fifth and final version of the instrument; the original was built 15 years ago using a rubber glove. Sonami admitted, “It started as a joke, I must say.” The current glove is a black evening glove studded with an enormous number of sensors and connected by a thick cable of wires to a belt. Sonami’s performance consisted of a complicated set of hand gestures and arm movements, which she combined to trigger and manipulate sounds. Having worked with versions of this instrument since 1991, she said, has allowed her to go through a learning process. Now, she is fluent in performing with the glove and intuitively responds to its particularities: “Like any physical object,” she said, “it has its own parameters and demands.” Sonami reflected further on aesthetic evolution within the field of music technology. She identified a nostalgia for hands on work, for errors and mistakes. In the 1980s, she said, there was a desire for predictability and efficiency, which made sense for use by consumers, but perhaps not so much, she suggested, for art. The process of growing with a system and making it better seemed to her an important aspect of this work. “At the beginning,” Sonami added, “I thought I had to prove that I could make [the glove] work.” It seemed important to validate the technological project by getting the invention to be able to imitate a traditional instrument. She continues to be interested in creating hybrid systems that privilege expressive power over control. Singer followed up on Sonami’s comments with his own sense that new instruments mature as performers “stop thinking about individual sensors and begin thinking about gestures.” As fluency increases, performance becomes rooted more in intuition. Singer then discussed his own inventions, which are primarily robots that respond to MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) software. His work on LEMUR, the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, for example, included building ForestBot, the idea for which was spawned by
imagining what would happen to another robot that had “evolved far into the future.” Singer has built musical sculptures that have been installed at the Angel Orensanz Foundation in New York, which were manipulated over the internet from California. He refers to this style as “open-source composing.” He also offered footage of his Pyrophone, a device that combines musical performance with computer-controlled pyrotechnics. He ended by demonstrating his GuitarBot, a large, freestanding robot with rollers that restrict four strings at a time, creating various chords. Its eerie, self-propelled twang was worth waiting for. The panel concluded and took time for discussion and questions and answers from the audience, and a catered lunch offered further opportunities for conversation. Left to right, top to bottom: ForestBots, designed by Eric Singer Laetitia Sonami demonstrates her Lady’s Glove. Dan Trueman’s Bowed Sensor Speaker Array (BoSSA) Panelists Eric Singer, Dan Overholt, Dan Trueman, and Laetitia Sonami
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