The Cave of Sounds: An Interactive Installation Exploring How We Create Music Together.
Tim Murray Browne, Dom Aversano, Susanna Garcia, Wallace Hobbes, Daniel López, Tadeo Sendon, Panagiotis Tigas, Kacper Ziemianin, Duncan Chapman · New Interfaces for Musical Expression · 2014
The Cave of Sounds is an interactive sound installation formed of eight new musical instruments exploring what it means to create instruments together. Each instrument was created by an individual but with the aim of forming a part of this new ensemble, with the final installation debuting at the Barbican in London in August 2013. In this paper, we describe how ideas of prehistoric collective music making inspired and guided this participatory musical work, both in creation process and in the audience experience of musical collaboration. Following a detailed description of the installation itself, we reflect on the successes, lessons and future challenges of encouraging creative musical collaboration among members of an audience. 1. DESIGNING FOR ENSEMBLE The Cave of Sounds is an interactive installation inviting its audience to connect with each other through playing with eight original instruments. The work is the outcome of a ten month process in which eight individuals each created an instrument, all focused on forming a single ensemble. It is not uncommon for digital musical instruments (DMIs) to be created as collaborations between individuals, or to be played together within an ensemble. However, new DMIs are often created as solo instruments. Particularly with the seemingly limitless options available, there can be a temptation to create a one-man-band instrument, in need of no accompaniment to create a complete sound. By contrast, many traditional instruments have evolved together to work as an ensemble. Within an orchestra, the instruments typically fit within a specific spectral space and fulfill different roles. This is not to suggest that the creative possibilities of DMIs should be limited by boundaries we infer from traditional instrumental practice. DMIs need not occupy the same role in musical performance as traditional instruments [6]. However, a consideration of history can highlight new types of musical practice made possible by DMIs. When we design an instrument, we decide the sounds it ∗Tim Murray-Browne is also a researcher at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. NIME’14, June 30 – July 03, 2014, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Copyright remains with the author(s). creates, the actions its player will perform and how action and sound relate. Therefore, as well as a challenge of engineering [8], the instrument can itself be an artistic medium expressing its creator’s musical ideas [11]. Instruments designed through personal artistic practice may be created not for their take up by others, but as part of the composition process [9]. However, such instruments can also be created as an interactive work specifically for others (including nonmusicians) to play [1, 2]. Here, the experience of the participant is of primary interest. More so, we argue, than how an audience might rate the performance. A bespoke instrument provides a window into its creator’s musical mind. It is a first-hand journey of discovering the sounds available to you, the actions you must perform to create those sounds, and how much control you have over the process. In this way, creating instruments, whether for one’s own performance practice, or with the aim of asking an audience to play them, can be a form of open musical composition [10]. But if we take this view, what does it mean to improvise or compose music together? Can we compose instruments together much like we jam together? Dudas [4] describes ‘comprovisation’ as improvisation with DMIs where aspects such as mappings are prepared ahead of time and then modified or cycled through during improvisation. With The Cave of Sounds, we wanted to go a step further, creating instruments that are not only individually expressive artefacts of their respective creators, but conceived and created from the outset to belong to this new ensemble. Related work includes SensorBand, a trio formed of van der Heide, Karkorwski and Tanaka who played DMIs created for, and evolved through, ensemble performance. Tanaka [14] describes how the group play with potential confusion as to which instrument different sounds originate from. Identifying instrumental roles forms a part of the aesthetic experience. Although instruments in The Cave of Sounds are played by audience members rather than performers, the emergence of roles through musical collaboration remains similarly integral to the work, as discussed below.