what we'll try and develop through our
research is this sense of movement and
sound to explore how movement and sound
can correspond to create a kind of
intuitive interface with the string
my name is dai mainstone i am artist in
residence at queen mary university where
i experiment with new musical interfaces
doing a residency at ibeam center for
art and technology i was often told to
like go and get inspired by the city and
so i'd often go up to the brooklyn
bridge and just kind of watch people and
listen i started to think about what
could happen if we could somehow create
a sound insulation on the bridge and i
was thinking about all the different
sounds that you hear on the bridge so
there's the kind of hum and the
vibration of the steel cables themselves
because essentially the bridge is a
giant instrument with these kind of
steel cables under stress and tension in
the same way as a violin or a heart
might have that and i wondered if i
could somehow collaborate to create a
kind of parasitic instrument that would
magnetically attach to the bridge and
enable people pedestrians or dancers to
remix them through kind of movement and
collaboration
this is a heart note it has a spring
inside of it and some string so when you
pull the string
we are able to measure using sensors the
length of the piece of string the speed
at which you pull it and also the angle
of the string and all of that
information is then sent through to the
max patch here where it's processed it
runs through a granular synthesizer
which allows it to have different sonic
effects that information is then sent
through to ableton live where it's
processed so that each one of these has
its own specific sound and it also
recognizes the kind of motion
of the the ways in which this piece of
string is pulled and
allows you to use that as a control
each of these heart modules like any
instrument it can be you can compose
something for it ciid copenhagen in
school and we made
huge progress made a further eight heart
notes which we then developed further in
london making adding all the technology
and the arduino in their current state
they're not recording environmental
sounds they're simply they have sounds
which have been pre-chosen just so that
you can hear how they work but what we
hope is that we will create an interface
that can record specific sounds so you
can pick what you want to record and
ideally wherever we start with this
project we collaborate with local
musicians and dancers and try and get a
flavor of the kind of host location
we're going to create fittings onto
these they could be magnetic and
rubberized so they won't damage the kind
of architectural integrity of the bridge
in any way then the dancers or
pedestrians can just pull these and they
attach to a holster by these magnetic
landing pads
what really struck me during this phase
was this kind of metaphor of the bridge
so not only was the metaphor of bridge
and heart but bridging connection and
already what was happening through this
project was i was bridging information
from copenhagen in london so i was
coming with an idea and taking it to new
york and connecting with these people
and it was kind of picking up momentum
and gaining strength and so it seemed to
me that i had to really sort of
capitalize on this idea of this bridge
and connecting people and through kind
of bridging information and sharing the
project and breaking it down into chunks
it was more likely that i could actually
find a way to do the performance on the
bridge in the long term
you