This exhibition is part of the Street science,Human perception, and Musical Spacesprogrammes
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Vertical Orchestra, a Prototype
Contemporary musical rhythms and forms express the mind’s ever-changing norms. But while many aspects of music and musical composition have changed, the spatial architecture of the orchestral performance has varied relatively little. Orchestras are almost exclusively organized horizontally with sound divided by timbre: strings here, woodwinds there, brass over there, etc. This historical convention has resulted in a musical brain that almost exclusively perceives and conceives of music as a temporal form devoid of spatial structure.
The Soundwall is both a scientific tool and platform for musical composition. As a research tool, the Soundwall enables us to explore the process by which the brain literally ‘makes sense’ of ambiguous sensory information. As a musical platform, the Soundwall enables us to create music from light, by converting colour into 77 separate, spatially distributed sonic tracks of violins, pianos, voice, etc. The Soundwall is also a prototype of the more ambitious project called vEnsemble, which aims to subvert our normative experience of music by literally ‘verticalising’ the orchestra and orchestra hall. Collaborators include R. Beau Lotto (lottolab studio), Larry Groves (composer), Kevin Amos (composer), the London Sinfonietta, ARUP and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
The Soundwall was exhibited publicly for the first time at The Brain Unravelled Exhibition http://www.thebrainunravelled.com/ in London in 2009.
Visuals from the exhibition
Click on image for slideshow.
Click on image for slideshow.
Video Downloads
The two pieces of music presented here were created by Larry Goves and Beau Lotto, respectively. Whereas Beau Lotto’s piece is an arrangement of an existing piece of music but distributed across 77 channels in space, Larry Goves’ created an original composition for cello and piano. The visuals projected opposite the soundwall representing the temporal and spatial patterns of sound were created by Beau Lotto.
Larry Goves Visual
About Larry Goves’ piece: “This piece takes the quite traditional world of the cello and piano into the less familiar world of a wall of 77 speakers. More conventional musical melodic shapes and harmonies are skewed as the music expands across the sound wall so the results are poised somewhere between the known and the alien. At different points in the piece the speakers are treated as a way of moving two instruments around, as imaginary individual performers in their own right and as sonic pixels on a sound 'screen'. (Larry Goves)”
Images by: Sylvain Deleu Photographer