Etiquette in Edinburgh
July 5, 2010 |12:15 | Kids Etiquettes By : Team X
Eat your heart out, Microsoft Surface! Musicians are taking up interactive tables as new ways of making their creations physically accessible, so listeners can reach out and touch the work.
Etiquette is a new interactive installation at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, featuring a light box on which musical elements can be manipulated by moving around blocks.
It uses the same underlying library that was developed for the ReacTable synth, currently made famous by its use on Bjork’s tour.
But what’s nice about the Etiquette is surprise the music. Rather than predictable electronic sounds, Etiquette echoes and vibrates with laptop-sampled acoustic timbres, such as stand-up bass, banjo, brass, flute, and even glockenspiel. It’s still digital music: fragments of music are reconceived in the digital world, overlapping into an ambient landscape. But the common criticism of installation art — that you wouldn’t want to sit and listen to the music produced is answered here.
Etiquette is available as a downloadable Creative Commons-licensed four-track album. I just sat and listened to it, and was quite happy! It’s real music played by real musicians that seems perfectly suited to its interactive counterpart; the free-flowing form of the music is ideal for rearranging in an installation. (In somewhat less interactive form, I expect I may have it on repeat here in my studio on and off for the next few days!)
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