Product design students at the Royal College of Art have invented some imaginative new musical instruments by linking technology to everyday items. Vicky Richardson reports.
Is it coincidence that the word used to describe the activity associated with a musical instrument is ‘play’? Japanese electronics manufacturer Yamaha does not think so. The company has been making musical instruments for more than 100 years and sports equipment for about 50 years. It sees the connection between the two as an opportunity to gain satisfaction in mastering a skill through practice.
In November 2008, Yamaha’s London design studio, which in recent years has been responsible for some of the company’s most interesting new products, set a brief for students on the RCA’s MA in Design Products. Working under the tutorship of Tomoko Azumi, 22 students tackled the brief to design an instrument and then perform with it. Described as ‘making serious fun’, the instrument should not only provide enjoyment, but a deeper satisfaction and a sense of achievement.
During the four-month long project, students took part in workshops involving a musician, a performer and a sportsman. By the first presentation in December, 15 students remained and by the second, 12 carried on developing their ideas to the stage where they could put on a performance. In mid-March, a panel of critics, including Azumi, Jurgen Bey, Gareth Williams, David Keec-h and Kunihiro Takei from Yamaha, sat down in front of a strange array of wires, laptops, microphones and other objects that constituted the students’ musical tools.
The first performance was a hard act to follow. Fabien Capello had thought about how people’s skills in non-musical activities might be transferred. He settled on typing as comparable with playing an instrument, and from there began to link up the sounds of particular combinations of letters, words and phrases. Using a manual typewriter, Capello connected each letter to a note, so that when a text is typed, the results appear in a musical form, while a trace is left on the sheet of paper.
Though not exactly music as we know it, the language of this new instrument had rhythm, given by the tapping of the keys, while the pattern of notes came from the repetition of word formations. The resulting performance was surprisingly moving. As Capello said poetically, ‘I wish you could read the sound. I wish you could hear the text’.
The idea of using non-musical skills to produce music was a reoccurring theme in several students’ projects, though none worked quite as succesfully as Typing the Sound. Azusa Murakami’s project linked knitting with music-making, and created a music box in which a piece of patterned knitting could be scanned to produce sound. In a similar vein, Yiting Cheng and Jessica Ting-Chung Cheng explored the sounds and rhythm of everyday life with a study of putting on clothes. Their performance, Daily Tempo, in which they ‘played’ garments they were wearing by zipping and unzipping, popping and buttoning was touching and entertaining, and genuinely drew attention to the sounds and rhythms inherent in daily life.
In his first year of the course, Benjamin Newland’s project was a mature piece of work relating sound and colour. The Chromophone is a set of tools that ‘reads’ colour and translates it into sound. The tools consist of a camera to turn views and scenery into music; a pen for sampling colour from drawings and pictures, and a wand to create and perform music. Although this was an ambitious approach, ultimately Newland’s project raised more questions than it answered. Having designed the Chromophone, the more creative project is surely to investigate how to map music on to colour in order to produce an emotional effect on the listener.
The students will be performing at Futuresonic 2009 in Manchester, 13-16 May. For information, visit www.futuresonic.com
Tomoko Azumi will be in conversation with Vicky Richardson at Asia House at 6.45pm, Thursday 16 June. For information and tickets visit www.asiahouse.org
The Students and their Instruments:
Azusa Murakami: Knitting Scanner
The Knitting Scanner reads patterns in knitted garments and translates them into music. Knitting was chosen as a way of making music visually tangible as they share many similar qualities: rhythm, pattern, structure, language, and improvement through constant repetition. Initially two aspects of knitting were explored for their potential musical translation, the movement of the needles, and the patterns in the knitting. After parallel investigations with prototypes, the pattern reader was chosen as it had more strength as a project for the possibilities of exploring the cultural and interactive aspects of knitting.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyRxlSLTdKg&feature=channel
Benjamin Newland: Chromophone
Chromophone is a set of tools that allows people to make music from the colours that they see. Many parallels can be drawn between colour and sound, and using them together can help develop our understanding of both. The Chromophone kit has a colour sampling tool that can be used in three ways: a camera to make music from views and scenery, a pen for sampling colours from drawings and pictures, and a wand to create and perform music from and within an environment. The second unit converts the sampled colours into musical notes and plays them through its built in speaker. Chromophone opens up opportunities to make music from your environment and your view, compose graphically, and combine stories, music and drawing in new ways.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63GdhzGpZUk
Fabien Cappello: Typing the Sound
Typing the Sound is a project where the skills we developed in typing text on a keyboard are turned into a musical ability, and where the narrative of a text is used to create music.
I wish you could read the sound.
I wish you could hear the text.
Written language becomes an interface for the musical performance. From there a lot of possibilities are imaginable…
Sounds leave traces on paper and my music becomes readable.
I wish you could read the sound.
I wish you could hear the text.
The worst text can be turned into the most beautiful music, and words that make sense sound good together.
Giuseppe Guerriero: Physical Sequencer
The aim of this project is to give physicality to electronic music by re-establishing visual and gestural references, to let both the audience and the musician experience how electronic music is produced. Using step sequence technology, this instrument allows the player to compose music through his or her body movements. Fifty sensors around its surface detect the player’s motions and transform the way electronic music is played into an embodied practice, like dance and theatre.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzdhIeU-Um0
Jozephine Duker: Ceramic Sound Landscape
The Sound Landscape, consisting of porcelain bowls on flexible rubber feet, invites people to play music, using their hands or everyday objects like a pen. A moment of pleasure and musicality is created when walking from one place to another in an office building or school, for example. A single mould is used to cast the ceramic bowls in different thicknesses and sizes. This creates the different tones, which are structured in a grid from low to high. This allows people to explore the surface and to learn to play it.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-Ny2BtYqxk
Lucia Massari: Audio/Video Collection
“For a book to live, it just has to be possible” Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, 1941
I’m using books as a vehicle to believe that everything is possible.
You write music into a book, you read music from a book.
My project turns the book directly into an instrument, without any diversion, so that everyone can play it.
By shifting the idea people can have of an ordinary object, I transform its meaning in order to create an extraordinary object.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4KXs-GCoSc&feature=channel
Matthew Plummer-Fernandez: Faraday Drone
In 1831 Michael Faraday demonstrated that electricity could be human-powered by means of an electromagnetic device. The divide between human-powered musical instruments and electrical instruments prompted me to go back to that elementary discovery and apply it to the basic creation of a human-powered electronic instrument. Winding and manipulating an electric motor by hand create electrical and magnetic fields. These equate to drone sounds of controllable pitch, volume and human nuances when transferred to a speaker. The human-generated electrical signal can be further processed by analogue and digital means to create a wider range of textures and timbres.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS5fXlumiNE&feature=channel
Vahakn Matossian: Furniture for the Musical Human
F4MH is a self-contained micro-stage, performance space and sound-system. It is an instrument for anyone to explore their vocal range and is designed for both accomplished vocalists and total musical novices. A microphone, joystick and sound horns are built into a comfortable lounge chair which houses an audio processing ‘brain’. Minute movements of the joystick add vibrant and complex musical effects to the voice, which can be experimented with freely or mastered with delicate precision. The player is encouraged to talk, whisper, breathe, wail and sing into the microphone, exploring their vocal chords in ways they would never attempt in normal vocal communication, producing an immersive and heightened experience.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qs5NSmsWJQ
Yiting Cheng and Ting-Chung Cheng: Daily Tempo
People have different paces in their daily lives. Through the movements of “putting on clothes” as a basic everyday activity, we want to create a wearable instrument which produces sounds that reflect users’ daily habits, rhythms, emotions and tastes in music. We use clothing elements including buttons, zip fasteners, velcro and pins, each assigned a different function, such as beats, notes, effects and choosing music genres. The users have to practice on the instrument to find sound combinations. And the sounds they make with their body movements will create the visual and audible performance.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flwYADq28eg&feature=channel
Comment by Gareth Williams, senior tutor, MA Design Products, Royal College of Art:
Music is an abstract art form through which we express who we are and our experiences of the world. It is a parallel language to text or design, but like words or things, music touches our emotions and is a tangible output of the human condition.
Making music requires a degree of virtuosity, whether the instrument is simply the human voice or a sophisticated fabricated mechanism. As well as being akin to language, therefore, music is also about performance.
These designs are the fruit of the second collaborative project between Yamaha and Design Products students at the Royal College of Art, whose task was to configure a new form of musical instrument. The linguistic analogy, connecting music and text, interests some of these young designers. For example, Fabien Cappello literally transformed the action of typing on a keyboard into the creation of musical notes to explore the rhythmic and tuneful potential of text to generate sound. They were also concerned with music’s performative quality, as shown by Giuseppe Guerriero’s Physical Sequencer, an interface that expanded the relatively static process of creating electronic music on a keyboard into a dynamic activity whereby the device responded directly to the dance-like motions of the player.
For many of these designers, the creation of musical instruments became the opportunity for introspection and reflection on the human condition. Azusa Murakami considered the similarity between knitting and making music, because both involve “rhythm, pattern, structure, language, and improvement through constant repetition”. In their joint project Daily Tempo, Yiting Cheng and Ting-Chung Cheng make the banal act of getting dressed into the opportunity to create complex musical notes and sounds.
For some of the designers, the process of producing sounds was paramount. Matthew Plummer-Fernandez used manually generated electromagnetic fields to create a human-powered electrical instrument he calls the Faraday Drone. For the Chromophone, Benjamin Newland adapted sensor technology to generate sounds and notes from the colours we see around us.
Lastly, some of the designers where interested in expanding the potential of tiny gestures. Lucia Massari examined the sounds made by the pages of books, Jozephine Duker creates notes just by passing by her ceramic wall installation, and Vahakn Matossian makes whole new soundscapes for the human voice.
None of these are traditional instruments but they all respond to the emotional triggers of music making and performance.
