#playablestreets

This week I had the pleasure of creating an installation at Abbotsford Convent with my good friend, collaborator and all round mad genius Glen Walton. Glen created an art business called Playable Streets a while back. We build interactive installations that connect people with their surroundings and each other through touch…or in other words, we wire stuff up so that when you touch it, it makes sounds. I have been the composer for a couple of projects and it has been a blast.

 For this installation Glen pitched the idea of playable plants. I learnt a lot from my last work at the In Touch exhibition and I wanted to focus on simpler sounds, fuller sounds that provided instant tactile gratification. I began with a set of piano tones in a pentatonic scale but quickly shifted to the idea of using the harmonic series. A little background –

 The harmonic series is a collection of pure tones contained in every sound you hear. Without getting too deep in to the science of acoustics, all notes contain a series of overtones at exact ratios – an octave, an octave and a fifth, two octaves, an octave and a third and so forth. Take the note C1, the overtones above this would be C2, G2, C3, E3, G3, Bb3 and so on. Here’s where it gets cool – the amplitude or volume of these overtones is what creates timbre or the way that something sounds. Humans do not perceive these tones separately, we hear them as a note that sounds like a piano, or a note that sounds like a saxophone. Pretty cool!

 Clearly, I like to nerd out on this. There a few things that you can draw from these artefacts and one of them is important for this project – these ratios represent a stable harmonic basis for building chords in an orchestration sense. Put another way: if you play all these notes together it ought to sound pretty good, rich and sonorous even. We put this to the test in the PLAYSpace installation. We had 12 notes to play with, so I mapped up to the 11th partial – C1, C2, G2, C3, E3, G3, Bb3, C4, D4, E4, F#4, G4. Some of you may look at those notes and feel that the F# and Bb should sound pretty weird…but they don’t. The resemblance to a Lydian Dominant mode lends the sound all the attributes that come along with this sonority; a sense of wonder and playfulness.