20-29 July

An exhibition of artist-made instruments, noise generators, audio-visual manipulators, and recordings. Featuring leading sound artists, experimental composers, noise-makers and other audio creators from the UK, Austria, France, Germany, Portugal, Japan, and the USA, each exploring what we understand to be an instrument. A mix of high tech and low tech - live installations, concert performances, and abstract busking. Each instrument is extraordinary and innovative.

Curated by Colin Fallows and Drew Hemment, Instrument features an exhibition at The Museum of Science and Industry Manchester plus live performances.

Exhibitions Free

 


sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!

Sven König (DE)

Scrambled Hackz analyses the audio portion of a video file to determine the tempo of the incoming audio, and then slices it up into discrete chunks of a quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note and so on. Using a large number of vectors, those slices are classified into a database according to their sonic characteristics. When the user sends new audio information to the program using e.g. voice and microphone, it follows approximately the same process, becoming classified in the database. The software outputs the pre-analysed sample that is most similar to the newly cached sample. The result, which can be seen in the video, is the ability to reconfigure a number of music videos on the fly, so that they produce a sound similar to whatever is input. On screen the software plays the frames of video that accompany the selected audio.

 


Drawn

Zachary Lieberman (USA)

Drawn features live painting radically augmented in real time, creating a fictional world in which the painted forms appear to come to life, rising themselves off the page and interfacing with the outside world. The work explores the musicality and immediacy of drawing by turning simple brushstrokes of ink into complex and energetic life forms. A table holds the paper, ink and brushes the performer uses to draw. A mounted camera positioned above the table captures the drawing and this seemingly 'live' image from the camera is then projected for the audience to observe. However, the projected image is not entirely unadulterated – custom software works as an intermediary step between the camera and projection, performing complex analysis of the video image and augmenting the image in real-time with synthetic graphics. The result is a hybrid video signal. Combining both factual and fictional pixels in order to create an artificial but entirely believable world in which hand-drawn gestures appear to have a mind of their own.

 


Sonic Armchair

Kaffe Matthews (UK)

Sonic Armchair (1997) is a 1950's armchair with eight speakers installed under the upholstery, and a remote control for each sitter to play a specially made work by Kaffe Matthews. Titled '... for Doris Whincopp' the piece contains deep-layered and circular sounds, which vibrate through and around the sitter massaging in shifting layers and patterns. A penetrating bass underneath, with two patterns gliding left to right at different speeds across the shoulders and the lower back and kidneys, the high frequencies buzzing circular around the ears.

"I've long been interested in the physical experience of music and have made two sonic armchairs which combine the vibrational sensations of music perception with aural to make new compositions. These chairs, with speakers immersed under their upholstery, create situations that transform the listening experience for the sitter, turning 'weird' or 'boring' music into something meaningful."

 


Can You Hear Me?


Peter Appleton and Simon Thorne (UK)

Fragile voices gently floating in an empty acoustic space sometimes singing into the quiet resonance of a banjo echoing the distant strum of a half-remembered blues. The solitary microphone inviting you the passing listener to record your own voice into the growing residue of transient utterances across the ether waves. The experience is a delicate accumulation of phantom resonances and past traces that makes up the evolving archive of the installation and leads back to the first spark of telephonic communication. Can you hear me?

For the purposes of this installation eavesdropping and surveillance are recast as an intimate exchange of speaking and listening. Real voices speaking of real experience, asking a question of which we cannot be certain that the answer is anything other than silence.

LSD Drive

Simon Blackmore (UK)

A CD drive taken from an old PC has been taken apart. The complex motors have been made to function again using hand coded microcontrollers. The laser that normally reads the data of the CD has been replaced by a light sensor that detects changes in light levels through the disk. By detecting the amount of light that falls through the disk, the drive is able to read the areas of lost data on a disk. This information is sent to a computer as midi data and then processed by a custom program written in the Open Source software application SuperCollider. The result is a fully functioning piece of computer hardware with accompanying software that allows users to make music with the hands-on process of scratching the disk. The project has been developed with support from STEIM, Amsterdam and the Arts Council of England.

 


Translate

John J. Campbell (UK)

The voice is the most accessible and intuitive of all instruments, unique both to each individual and culture. In this piece which belongs to a series of works produced during a period of research into the more abstract and emotive qualities of vocal expression, the source materials are fragments of found and recycled vocal performances from the Saami people's tradition of the Joik. Using techniques more usually associated with the processing and re-voicing of electronic string instrumentation the original recordings are gradually morphed from the original vocal language to the language of the electric guitar.

John J. Campbell is Visiting Fellow in Sound at Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University. Funded by Arts Council England.

 


The Arc

Max Eastley (UK)

"The monochord I play developed from my investigations into the musical bow, which was occasionally referred to as an Aeolian instrument. In 1977 I was exhibiting with Hugh Davies in London, and was asked by Hugh to perform with him in the installation space. I was not improvising at that time but found a solution by taking one the Aeolian bows and playing it as an instrument. The name I chose for the instrument is the Arc. The techniques of playing the instrument are related to quarter and eighth tone instruments such as the Sitar, the ear being crucially allied to physical movement of the single string. The pitch is changed in several ways. The body of the instrument can be flexed which lowers the pitch to produce extreme bass sounds at almost zero tension, or using slide techniques, glass rods, fingers or bow the instrument can produce a very wide range of higher pitches. The instrument is electro acoustic with a magnetic pick up at one end, consequently the analogue signal can be digitally modelled and transformed."

 


Noise-Machine Orchestra

Colin Fallows (UK)

Noise-Machine Orchestra is a special mix of recordings made in the Plant Room - a permanent functioning installation located in the attic of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Situated above the showcase recording studios, the Plant Room is designedly hidden from general view and hearing in this purpose-built 'intelligent building'. The Plant Room, which contains a variety of sound generators including Chilled Water Circulation Pumps and Air Supply and Extraction System, was treated as a large scale digitally controlled ready-made noise-machine orchestra. The instruments of the Plant Room were programmed and orchestrated in a series of special arrangements as they performed their daily flow. Sounds combined in a series of digital mixes were recorded utilising the same system of microphones used by classical orchestras.

 


Pangeia Instrumentos

Victor Gama (PT)

Victor Gama combines high tech instrument design with ancient, African musical forms. Pangeia Instrumentos are acoustic musical instruments, sound devices and installations designed and built as a process of experimentation with form, design, sound and music. He initiated the Pangeia Instrumentos project in the early 1990s in which he uses form as a variable in the composition process. He has since developed The Golian Modes Theory in which the score has a three dimensional component. The Golian Modes are four musical modes derived from the ancient Kongo/Angolan graphic writing system known as Bidimbu. The basis of the Golian modes are the fundamental cosmogram known as Dikenga, and the concept of N'kizy, a religious object that is used to establish communication with the ancestors world.

 


Leverage

Open Music Archive (UK)

Leverage centres around the creation of copyleft licensed 12 inch vinyl records containing a range of samples, beats and extracts from the archive in a format referencing scratch tools, breaks compilations and battle records. Battle records are explicitly designed as tools for DJs. Often the breaks, beats and samples collected on these records are created from tracks that are not officially licensed. In contrast, Leverage will feature rare recordings and new remix tracks, short vocal snippets, percussive noises, sounds, samples, breaks and beats - all in the public domain or copyleft licensed and available via the Open Music Archive website. It is intended that the vinyl tool will enable future production that exists outside of the usual commercial and bootleg economies. The project adopts the form and structure of the battle record to build open vinyl code – which, like free/libre and open source software, is distributed freely.

 


iLog

Owl Project (UK)

A potent mix of wood, low-tech computer and personal stereo iLog is the latest 'must-have' consumer gadget from Manchester-based artist group Owl Project, combining computation, sonic artistry and ... woodwork. Featuring computer circuits lovingly encased in a wooden log, originally devised as an eco-alternative to using laptops during live audio performances The iLogs have been so successful that they now include several software packages and new improved Log Operating Systems: Squirrel and Badger 2005, with limited editions out for Christmas.

 


Guitar Retrospective

Keith Rowe (UK/FR)

A series of 3 wall/screen-mounted installations made up of instruments and preparations, archiving Keith Rowe's career as an international experimental musician.

"In many respects Guitar Hangings is the completion of a cycle, that cycle starts in the mid 1960's with me laying the guitar flat on the table. I've always considered what I did then was to apply the 'Process of Painting' to the guitar, laying the guitar flat was Pollock, finding objects was Duchamp, applying those objects to the strings was Braque, using the radio was Rauschenberg, the production of dense heavy drones was Rothko, etc. Now in 2006 by returning the guitars to the vertical, framed and fixed to their tables, they take on the condition of painting."

The Speech Guitar: Improvisational Mobile Street and Public Performance

Jon Cambeul (UK)

The Speech Guitar is an instrument to create choral music by chance, improvisation and emotionally expressed speech synthesis. The project considers possibilities of using an appropriated modified graphics tablet combined with joystick potentiometers as a device for parametric control of a library of modular software patches to edit the Mac OS and Flite Speech Synthesizers. When playing this instrument the performer emulates a guitarist. By holding the graphics tablet in a similar way as a guitar and drawing upon its surface during a performance feels natural. It also challenges why digital devices should conform to a typical desktop interface. Furthermore, with the idea of performance in mind, it is a combination between the aesthetic of rock and digital music where in order to perform you have to engage the whole body.

 


Duelling Etch-A-Sketches

Pete Hindle (UK)

Duelling Etch-A-Sketches attempts to reclaim the act of making music as public behaviour, using the famous children's toy. "By selling music as an object to be listened to, rather than a manuscript that anybody could alter, record companies became rich and our notion of music changed. It is impossible for most people to think of gathering around the piano doe a sing-song, as our grandparents might have done, and so we are left with the static, unchanging thing that music has become - packaged for demographics, sold as a compilation. Duelling Etch-A-Sketch attempts to redress that imbalance, by offering the easiest interface possible to create music."

Tenori-On

Toshio Iwai (JP)

UK-first live performance of Tenori-On from one of Japan's leading artist-musicians. Toshio Iwai plays the aptly-named Tenori-On - Japanese for 'sound on your palm'. Developed by Toshio Iwai and the Yamaha Corporation, this hand-held instrument creates sound and ambient light patterns in a performance that fuses what we hear with what we see. Tenori-On consists of 16x16 LED switches, and, like an ordinary personal stereo, includes a jog dial, LCD display and stereo speakers. The device knows how long, from which direction and at what angle the LED switches are touched. Several Tenori-On devices can be connected together to create collaborative music and image.
http://tenorion.blogspot.com

 


Tosterasta

Vergil Sharkya' (UK) plus guest musicians

Tosterasta contains hypercompositions for digital and acoustic instruments, specially arranging for CD-player, laptop, sound modulators, acoustic guitar and oboe. Vergil Sharkya's aesthetic, a 3-D-sonic space of warped frequencies and grooves, is defined by contrapuntal density, multi-dimensional polyrhythmic pulses, free harmonic structures and melodic series of seemingly endless micro-glissandi. Hypercomposition is the latest stage in Sharkya's quest for a means of composing music that reflects and extends the development of western art music, yet at the same time manages to communicate through its emotional immediacy, and, for want of a better word, beauty.