- They sound a lot like voices
or like an angry choir.
Somebody told me that they sound a lot like
sniffing a whole lot of magic markers all at once.
You can decide for yourself.
I'm Andy Cavatorta, and I'm a sculptor.
I work with robotics and with sound.
(soft music)
The work that I mostly do involves creating
new types of musical instruments
or new types of physical sounds.
A lot of times this has a lot to do
with motion and form.
What I'm sitting next to right here,
it's called the Dervishes.
It's got these 14 spinning arms.
It's similar to the toys that you played with
as a kid where you might spin a corrugated plastic tube
over your head.
There's a lot of circuit boards in here for motor control
and we measure the speeds very precisely.
And then there's a lot of software
that takes the specific pitches,
figures out exactly where they should be played
and at what speeds.
It's a lot of fine tuning all the way through
from the music that gets written for it
to the software that calibrates and adjusts
and controls it, all the way through to the fine tuning
and the motor controllers.
What I do is a bit on a parallel track
with a lot of what's happening in electronic music.
But I work specifically, almost exclusively,
with physical sound, almost never with synthesized sound
or samples or stuff like that.
Just because those are the ones that actually have
the most meaning to me.
All my life I've been interested in sound.
I think it's how I figure things out.
I always love when these instruments create
the possibility to make music that didn't exist before.