Visionary Instruments: The Light Harp

"We are the music makers, the dreamers of dreams."
- Arthur O'Shaughnessy

I recently discovered another new instrument designed for use by more than one person: Jen Lewin's ultra-cool Light Harp. Starting with a Theremin-type concept (waving your hands through space to make music) and expanding it into several new dimensions, the Light Harp is a massive installation piece that uses laser beams to translate its users' motions into sound.

You literally play this thing by catching light in your hand. Each beam measures both the height and speed at which it is broken and assigns them independent variables - volume, pitch, etc. Lewin has been making them for twelve years, but she's gotten a lot of exposure from more recent exhibitions at Burning Man 2005 and Wired's NextFest 2007.

Less a formal instrument and more an interactive sculpture, Lewin's vision is to have her Light Harps played with haphazardly with up to sixty people, while still making beautiful noise. Here is a demonstrative video of children playing the Light Harp (many more on her website):

...and here is a totally different use of the harp, featuring a dancer with gauzy wings:

So there you have it. The more we as a culture enter into a relationship with our environment and understand that all sound is music from the right perspective (paraphrasing Ken Wilber, "Art is anything with a frame around it"), the more we are going to create works of art that reveal this understanding.

The Light Harp is one such piece - a real work of grace that reminds us of our role as creators in the world and invites us to participate in that creation. An appropriate artifact for Burning Man, a festival at which the principle of "radical participation" - being through doing - is fiercely upheld as an antidote to our culture of passive consumption.

Long, long ao, we lost our sense that everyone is a musician, that everyone is an active part of the celebration. We marvel at African cultures in which everyone knows they can sing and dance, and does so from birth. We handed over the responsibility for our art to the chosen few, and then we handed over our choice. Now we live in an age in which most people believe that art (and especially music) is something that belongs to someone else, some nubile god-king or queen of the recording leviathan.

But at the same time, we are discovering the sacred voice of the world, the creative will of not just everyone, but everything. An increasing amount of popular music features "found sounds" and atmospheric rhythms gathered from natural sources. Björk's soundtrack to the film Dancer in the Dark is punctuated with the beats of factory machines, footsteps, and railcars.

We are waking up to a world that presents itself to us as a gift, and we in return are beginning to sculpt a culture that engages us as active co-conspirators in the divine dance of it all. Beauty is back in rank with Truth and Goodness. We are the music makers, again, finally. The Light Harp is proof.

(Written for iggli.com.)

Visionary Instruments: The Reactable

This is the first entry in a series I'll be doing on instruments that are revolutionizing the way we make - and understand - music. I was inspired to do this column by my introduction to one of the most inspiring inventions of any kind that I have ever seen, a wonderful new music performance device (it bends the definition of "instrument") called the reactable.

(I saw it at a Björk concert in April - leave it to her to debut musical technology that makes people feel like they've been cryogenically frozen for a hundred years!)

Devised by the Interactive Sonic Systems Team at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, the reactable is a totally novel musical control interface driven not by technology, but by a vision of a new way to make noise. The reactable homepage declares the intent behind it all - to make an instrument that is:

- collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
- intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
- sonically challenging and interesting
- learnable and masterable (even for children)
- suitable for novices (installations) and advanced electronic musicians (concerts)

No small task, and yet these people have pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Here are some demonstrations:

Now that you have an inkling as to how this works, here's an example of the reactable in a live environment, on the Björk tour for which none of us were even remotely prepared (don't skip ahead, but the reactable is nicely featured in a segment starting at 4:36):

So yeah. Go visit the team's reactable media page for a score of additional videos that boggle the mind (as well as hi-res versions of those above, so you can feel even more futuristic - and even an amusing clip of Bob Moog playing an early protoype).

What tickles me the most is that, not only did the Interactive Sonic Systems team start with an idea and then bring the technology up to the level of that idea (which, as far as I'm concerned, is how it should be done: leading with intention), but that they left enough clues that you can build your own! All of their publications from the inception of the idea can be found here. The open-source code they wrote to control the visual recognition elements can be found here. A few pieces are still proprietary, but there's enough information scattered around in user groups that some buddies of mine, members of the Boulder, CO visionary art collective Motion For Alliance, built their own prototype. They brought it out for its debut last night at the Trilogy Wine Bar in Boulder - and, of course, it blew everybody away. Here's a video of their "bootleg" reactable:

They had four people working this thing last night, simultaneously - a vivid demonstration of the new realm of collaborative improvisation this thing opens up for us. (I'll try and post a video from the concert here soon.) Pretty soon, Fisher Price will be making one, they'll be selling them at Wal-Mart, and cafés will be spilling over with acoustic guitar and reactable duos...at which point, musicianship will be a whole new game. Spain, I tip my hat to you.

The Music of Proteins

By now, all of us have probably seen a visual representation of a protein: some coiling, twisted affair, appropriately elegant and clumpy (these are, after all, "the building blocks of life" - which is, in aesthetic self-similarity, poised somewhere between awkwardness and grace). What most of us haven't experienced is listening to a protein - or, rather, the musical read-out of a protein's primary structure (the sequence of amino acids of which it is "composed").

Thankfully, in our age of gleeful synaesthesia, the good doctors at UCLA (a team led by Dr. Jeffrey H. Miller) have transcribed the sequences of several major proteins to sound by assigning each amino acid its own musical note and rhythm based on its chemical characteristics. The result is a library of often bizarre, occassionally glorious short pieces that squirm with an evocative lilt (complete with staff music, should you decide to learn how to play, for example, "Horse Hemoglobin"). Some kick a pretty latin groove; others are (at least according to the scientists) reminiscent of Chopin.

The system by which these proteins are translated into memorable tunes is informed by both biology and music theory (and therefore, psychology) - operating with a geometry more artful than the simple "one note per amino acid" correlations used by previous teams. In fact, the team has assembled a page of Art & Science collaborations that helped inspire the project.

I highly recommend you visit Gene2Music's fascinating and enjoyable page, at which you can even input your own base pairs into Convert-A-Gene to create a catchy musical number out of any gene sequence - thus, ushering in the age of writing a hit single with your paternity test.

(Written for iggli.com)