Misha Smith, who created the wonderful musical installation “Prototype for a Spatial Instrument” which is currently ‘in residence’ at the Centre asked me ‘for a favour’.  Would I like to have a go at testing out the instrument - he’s just added a new interactive aspect to the work, something he’s been working on for a while.  Would I?  What do you think! 

Until recently, the installation has been in kind-of ‘player piano’ mode; it can play midi files originated on other instruments or from software programmes.  And I suppose it could be played directly a bit like a keyboard.  Misha’s vision for the piece is that it should, in some sense, be aware of what’s happening in the space it occupies and also perhaps outside the space.  He has ideas for adding in ways to experience the piece more interactively; using the sound or movement of the people who move through the space.  Or of placing sensors on the outside so that it ‘plays the building’ as it senses changes in the outside world; tube trains passing, the changing sounds of the city, clouds passing across the sun, temperature changes and so on.

We attached a piezo sensor to the soundbox of the travel guitar that I keep at the Centre and away we went.  Misha asked me to write about my experience of ‘playing’ the instrument (it needs a proper name, really) and this post enables me to keep my promise to Misha. 

I know it’s an instrument and I think I understand (or have surmised) how this part of it works.  The piezo transducer picks up the frequencies at which the soundbox vibrates as I pluck the guitar strings, the computer does some kind of realtime frequency analysis of the signal - probably a Fast Fourier Transform; this ‘bands’ the signal into a set of frequencies which change over time.  The PC driving the instrument looks at this spectrum and makes decisions about which component of the spatial instrument is triggered - so I pluck a string and the instrument plays the equivalent note.  Oh no it doesn’t. 

Yes, the instrument responds to what I play.  But it’s not a one-to-one response and it would be less interesting if it were.  Most of the early sounds I got were a kind of rippling scale; nice until quietly informed by Misha that “This is what happens if it tries to play all the notes simultaneously.”  So I was over-stimulating the instrument.

When you see the video; there’s a point where I suddenly see a bit of what it’s like to ‘play’.  It’s a very odd feeling.  It’s not like jamming with someone.  It’s not like playing in a pub session; where the tunes go round and people join in.  And I know (and knew at the time) that it was essentially a machine.  It didn’t feel like that.  It felt like I was negotiating my way towards music.  As if an alien species had landed and we were trying to find a common language. 

I tried a number of ways of “communicating” with the instrument - changing the tuning of the guitar, reducing the scale length by using a capo to change the harmonics (the instrument is very sensitive to harmonics in its current state, I feel), changing the way I plucked the strings, damping the strings while playing using the palm of my hand; lots of other things.  Misha caught some of this on video. 

And I know that I was effectively exploring the “experience surface” created by the software and it was tremendously challenging and fun; I was drawn in by the work; exploring how I could make it play and what it would do in response to me.  The feedback loops created make it a very complex space to work in.  Maybe it was helping me explore how I interact with the guitar.  It was certainly ‘playing the building’ in a way that I could not do on my own with the soft-voiced travel guitar.  I could feel that the guitar was reacting to the sound environment in the building; there was a lot of feedback going on.

Overall, though, as well as exploring my relationship with the guitar, I was also enabled to explore my relationship with the space I was in.  I’ve felt this before with Misha’s work; that it changes the way I feel about the building.  Misha’s work enables the experience and exploration of physical space using sound and visual interventions in the space - so to a certain extent it’s a sort of manipulation of the space without too much physical intrusion or change - ‘architecture without walls'.  There is so much potential in this way of thinking about the world and how we move and exist in it.