Moving Instruments

Abstract

The author provides a brief description of a series of works using “moving instruments,” focusing on the autonomous mobility of the instrument detached from the performer

Supplemental materials such as audio files related to this article are available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewbZn7dncz4>.

The relationship between musical instruments and human performers has traditionally been unilateral in terms of movement and agency of action: The human moves his or her fingers, arms, legs or entire body in relation to a static object. Of course, keys may be pressed and released, mallets may go up and down, bows may move back and forth, and bellows may be pushed in and pulled out. Gears and pulleys may rotate and grind, as switches and levers can be moved around. But in most cases, the instrument itself remains fixed in one place.

The persistent stasis of instruments seems to be a correlative of the fixation of audience in seats: The instruments are stationary because the audience is assumed to be so. The relative mobility of musicians in a rock concert bounded by a stage, for instance, corresponds to the relative mobility of audience monitored by security. In any case, the fixed or relative stillness of the sounding object in relation to the audience sets an adequate distance between the two parties so that listening and appreciation can be carried out smoothly and under control.

There have been many attempts to counter this general tendency. Mostly these have consisted of either moving the performers carrying their instruments around a fixed audience or having the audience move around fixed instruments (i.e. a sound installation). The “moving instruments” that I have been developing in recent years can be seen as another contribution to this lineage of works. However, they differ from their precursors in at least one important aspect: I focus on the autonomous mobility of the instrument itself, detached from the performer. The very production of sound derives from, and is dependent on, this mobility. My approach can be sorted out into three series of works.

Lost Instruments

If instruments actually moved, they would surely get lost. So I made a work dedicated to that possibility. I created 44 rectangular-shaped instruments (5 × 3 × 3 inches each) that run on two wheels, each with a small speaker and a microphone connected to an Arduino with a pitch-detection program. The 44 instruments constantly output a specific pitch that I assigned to them by dividing the tonal range of a piano—in other words, when put together, they constituted a whole tone scale of 7⅓ octaves. Through the pitch-detection program, each instrument was set to react to a specific pitch, a half tone above the one it was playing out. The input of this specific pitch triggered the sound of the instrument to shift a half tone up to the same pitch. An Arduino Motor Shield R3 drove the motor for the wheels, and distance sensors (HC-SR04) were placed in half of the instruments so that they would circumvent physical obstacles.

At a concert, all 44 instruments were released in total darkness, and ran away in all directions while emitting their individually assigned tones. The performer waited for a couple of minutes until the instruments were lost, then went around looking for them by tracking their sounds. The performer carried a portable keyboard to aid the search by playing notes that would trigger any modification to the sound of nearby instruments. The performer’s task was to switch off the instruments, one by one, as they were found. Consequently, the entire performance was conducted in contrast to the usual norms of a concert: The role of the performer was not to emit sound, but to stop it—the concert started with the maximum number of tones possible, and then decreased one by one until total silence was reached.

Fig. 1.

Cody Eikman, electronic race instrument (drum) at “Race Music,” a concert organized by No Collective, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York. (© Cody Eikman. Photo © Ellen C. Covito)

Race Instruments

My second series of works was directly...