Reflections on Self-Playing, Sensor-Driven Guitars
01 Mar '19
This installation of six self-playing, sensor-driven guitars was developed at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion at the University of Oslo. Each guitar uses a distance sensor to track the movement of listeners in the environment, and sounds from an embedded computer are played through a speaker driver attached to the guitar body.
An early rationale for this work was to produce multiple autonomous instruments for installations; a contrast with DMI projects involving one “special” (and expensive instrument). Six inexpensive guitars were used as a basis for the project.
Each guitar is a completely autonomous instrument equipped with a Bela embedded computer for sound processing, an infrared distance sensor to detect the presence of visitors, and an actuator attached to the guitar body to produce sound. With a self-contained battery pack, the guitars were easy to hang in a gallery space.
I developed original sound patches for the guitars as part of my work with RITMO at the University of Oslo. The earliest work took place in August 2017 with a test installation at the UiO Department of Musicology followed by an installation during the Ultima festival. A later iteration was produced as an outdoor installation for the Life Science festival at the University Botannical Garden in February 2019.
The installations explored “inverse” sonic microinteraction: controlling sounds by the micromotion observed when attempting to stand still. The project is documented on the RITMO website. The later iterations of this project involved self-organising algorithms (including microphones for the guitars to listen to each other), combinations of performance with other robotic instruments, and network controlled lighting.
Reserach on the original (Ultima Festival) iteration of this project was presented at the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) 2018:
@inproceedings{nime18-Gonzalez,
author = {Gonzalez Sanchez, Victor Evaristo and Martin, Charles Patrick and Agata Zelechowska and Bjerkestrand, Kari Anne Vadstensvik and Victoria Johnson and Jensenius, Alexander Refsum},
title = {Bela-Based Augmented Acoustic Guitars for Sonic Microinteraction},
pages = {324--327},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
editor = {Luke Dahl, Douglas Bowman, Thomas Martin},
year = {2018},
month = {June},
publisher = {Virginia Tech},
address = {Blacksburg, Virginia, USA},
URL = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2018/nime2018_paper0068.pdf}
}