The Instrument Project encompasses a range of sound objects and kinetic sound sculptures. The project started before it was named, with ‘sound objects’. Sound objects are off-the-shelf (sugar and martini shakers, plumbing floats, pipes, rice cookers) or purpose-made (cases) objects that are fitted with audio playback technology using a variety of activation methods (press buttons, motion switches, accelerometers). Find the range of objects: A Case for Sound, Soundcan, Mixer, Coppertone, Soundball, Soundball (crate amp), Soundball (guitar amp), Piper, Piper (Bay).
Many of these objects started with a single set of sounds and still maintain those sounds (Mixer, Piper/Bay), but many are now used in the spirit.
The Instrument Project took off when I applied the practicality of the discrete object to kinetic work: lighter, more mobile machines that act like an instrument, where the machine could perform or be performed in many different contexts, each time reimagined. I was asking questions like: What would it be like to be surrounded by an instrument (an instrument that fully embraces being an apparatus, an assemblage of parts)? What if some of these instruments were kinetic, moved on their own? And what would happen if this instrument, with all its parts, could be mobile, moved to different resonant spaces to explore a variety of acoustic sites?
The Instrument Project includes works made with collaborators, developed by making an instrument based on some element of a collaborator’s practice. Sometimes mechanized, sometimes not.
Christof Migone’s Hit Parade performance was the starting premise for Count and Strike and Spin, Strike On, Millionaire (machine), Strike and Hit.
Eric Chenaux used spinning speakers in his solo recording and mouth speakers in the now-defunct band The Reveries as the starting point for the fluff collaboration, where we perform in the field to make a series of field-performance recordings that are then live-mixed in the studio using the Mic Spin and Amp Spin machines. Previous collaborations with Chenaux include Soundball (Dancehauling), Smedaholmen Tourist (with Amplifiers), Marla Hlady and The Tristanos, Warm Weather.
thirtyminutes collective is Aliayta Foon-Dancoes (Princeton, US), Paul MacIntyre (Cambridge, UK)and Liam Ross Gibson (Montreal).
