A string instrument that uses the walls of the space as its resonating chamber.
cast cement, bass strings & tuning gears, DC motors, felt, arduino microcontroller, custom circuit, wire. 2019.
Part of the exhibition Toward the Unsound at the Arts Club of Chicago, Jan 23 – April 27, 2019.
Wall-mounted, cement-cast, bass-stringed, motor-driven, felt-plucked, arduino-controlled, 3-string instrument that plays an evolving composition based on randomly picked sections of musical phrases. The random number is generated by electro-magnetic interference on one of the pins in the electrical circuit of the microcontroller itself.
The composition coded into the arduino has a set of 24 short passages and a larger programme that calls for the passages according to the random process and strings them together into a larger piece.
Here’s a quick video edit. More documentation coming soon.
And here’s a tape composition with recordings done in my studio. I was using a microphone very close to the strings and moving it closer to the cement pieces. There’s an interesting crackling sound that comes out of them:
