Strings On-Line

Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Çağrı Erdem, Charles Martin, Dongho Kwak, Habibur Rahman, Julian Fuhrer, Kyrre Glette, Michael Krzyzaniak, Qichao Lan, Stefano Fasciani, Tejaswinee Kelkar & Victor Gonzalez Sanchez

This physical-virtual installation explores the concept of entrainment in a setup with six self-playing guitars and three distance-controlled Dr Squiggles robots. The installation will be physically located in the fourMs Lab at the University of Oslo, Norway. Users will be able to experience an online stream of the installation, and can interact with the guitars and robots through a web interface.

Each of the guitars is equipped with a small computer that plays a digitally produced rhythmic pattern through an actuator mounted on the back of the instrument. The guitars also contain a built-in microphone, so that they can listen to their surroundings and try to entrain their pulse to the other rhythmic patterns in the room. The sonic result is a complex interplay between rhythm and chaos, structure and variation.

People are invited to interact with the Dr Squiggles robots through a web interface. This will result in tones being played in the room, which will again influence the entrainment process of the guitars. As such, the installation blurs between the physical and the virtual, local and global, and it plays with conceptions of differences between acoustic and digital instruments.

Credits:

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence scheme, project numbers 250698 and 262762.

Specific Information:

The audio is recorded with a binaural microphone, so it works best with a pair of headphones. The interaction most likely work best in Chrome or Firefox.

Installation Link:

https://www.uio.no/ritmo/english/projects/self-playing-guitars/events/2020/index.html