disclaimers:  The visual design looks like a programmer did it. Fixed soon.  It works fine in Chrome and Safari. Ditto.  The other three tabs are blank b/c they’re only useful when connected to the Gravity Harps

The idea was born during a slightly tense meeting after the Manchester parameters had changed. The Pendulum Ring was out for now. We needed a new idea. We had about 4 weeks and the clock was ticking. I drew this idea on a scrap of paper:

How this plays a complex song took a lot of explaining, and still does.

Prototype 0:
I went back to the workshop with Marina and we built an ugly mock-up with PVC pipe and cardboard to check if the size and proportions made any aesthetic sense. They didn’t. But we banged away at it until we felt better about it.

Prototype 1:
The next prototype was used to test whether the combination of swinging and rotation worked at all, mechanically and aesthetically. And James Patten needed to start testing a control system that was smart about the physics of pendulums. Here’s some of the slow video we shot of the tests:

Prototype 2:
The next version needed to make some music. That meant Marina and I needed to finish prototyping the harps. Our 2nd prototype harp was made of fiberglass, walnut, spruce and all the epoxy we could find. This is the harp Bjork used on the new album. Here is Marina putting the strings on for the first time.

And here is it under computer control:

I think this still tells the story pretty well:

It was finally starting to look like a win. So we pressed onward through weeks of 18-hour days.

Prototype 2:
There were so many parts to figure out. And Karl Biewald And Doug Ruuska machined some great mechanical solutions.

Our new harps would have larger shells of a home-made walnut veneer composite:

And the new stands would be cantilevers, hanging from the building’s columns:

James and I finished troubleshooting at 5AM on the day of a 9AM demo for Bjork.

The demo went really well! Our final prototype setup looked much like this nice photo by James Patten:

Manchester
I needed a robo-sitter in Manchester. Ryan Wistort was by far the best choice. I’m not sure how much I should be saying yet about the installation in Manchester. But these random bootleg videos are already out in the wild. It’s not good documentation, but it does feature Bjork!

Special thanks to (chronologically):
Marina Porter
Karl Biewald
Doug Ruuska
James Patten
Ryan Wistort

Concept 1
We discussed a lot of ideas in the first meeting. The first challenge was to play one of her lovely new songs with carefully synchronized pendulums. I tried to find a simple way to play the irregular pattern of the new song Solstice. This way wouldn’t work live. But for film it would be just fine:

Concept 2
Next, it was time to make some music. It would have been easy to place instruments on the floor and pluckers on the pendulums. But I wanted each to be self-contained. The first physical prototype worked out really well.

Marina Porter came through with 11th hour help on the cigar-box instruments:

Concept 3
The song is called Solstice, so I wrapped the line of pendulums into a circle, to create patterns that echo celestial cycles.

This would have looked amazing on camera. I still hope this idea gets used someday.

At this point I thought I knew what I was doing. So I worked with Dan Paluska and Bill Washabaugh to test out a mechanical drive system for pendulums. This it the prototype that taught us that you can’t fool the eye. It was going to have to be real, free-swinging pendulums.

Bill’s early CAD drawings reflected an original, simpler design in which each pendulum could play a number of different notes. This would give the instrument musical flexibility to play the structurally complex song with as few as 16 pendulums.

Concept 4
But Björk wanted each pendulum to play only one note, so that the patterns of motion echoed the patterns of the song. An instrument shaped like a song! I liked it. So I wrote this simulator to figure out how to do it. Click the image below to open it.

Marina Porter created a series of prototype harps made from fiberglass, spruce and aluminum.

Karl Biewald created these fresh renderings from our CAD models. They show the scope and shape of the finished ring and pendulums.

We were just ramping up for final production when the parameters of the Biophilia project changed, requiring a complete redesign.

We were all still excited to use gravity and robotics to play music. So we pushed forward again to create the Gravity Harps.

The weaver conveys a sense of care and mindfulness, but also an unknowable intelligence, like watching the careful mandibles of an insect.

Weaver (left) and Music Box (right) with trompong.

Music Box and Weaver hanging vertically (needs a better drawing)

The idea was to use water’s insistent softness to create music. In this rough prototype, I dropped water droplets on the strings of a harp to set them resonating.

Trying to  aim the droplets precisely was maddening.  They left the nozzles in non-deterministic directions and drifted in the slightest breeze. I modified the nozzles with guide-needles and increased the water’s surface tension by adding various chemicals.  But the randomness remained.

I liked the result when I finally got it working.  And I had a lot of 11th-hour help from the precise and perceptive Marina Porter.

I imagined a finished version looking something like this:

In the end I decided that I didn’t want to create a future in which Björk or I needed to precisely control falling droplets in various and unpredictable environments.  So these videos are all that is left of the work.

Photos by Marina Porter

Here’s a recording of one string, freely resonating while the frequency of its electromagnet changes.  Notice how rich sounds and timbres bloom in the spaces between the nodes.  It feels like scuba diving in the deep harmonics of just one string.

Like the Whirly-Bot, its upper notes all lay in the harmonic series above each string’s fundamental.  So I tuned the fundamentals in 31-tone equal temperament, which approximates patterns of the harmonic series much better than 12-tone equal temperament.  I wrote this interaction simulation to prove it to myself:

The sound is created by whipping air through corrugated plastic tubes. Each corrugated bump creates vibrating vorticies that energize a standing wave running the length of the tube.  Faster movement creates higher energies, shortening the wavelength of the standing wave.  So each carefully-tuned tube can create a scale in harmonic series.  Each tube’s fundamental note lies in standard chromatic tuning.  But each tube’s upper notes lie in the harmonic series, creating an airy/eerie tension in the tuning.

I designed the Whirly-Bot and built many prototypes in a string of frantic all-nighters with help from Bill Tremblay, Erik Nugent and many friends.

In the summer of 2009, Laura Arena of Lucky Gallery asked Luis Blackaller and I to create an installation to bring together the diverse people living in the blocks around her Red Hook gallery.

We created a fully-populated tiny Red Hook using satellite photos, digital cameras, scrap lumber, applied extroversion and one overtaxed laser cutter.

This video tells the story best:

I fell in love with Red Hook that summer – the quiet of its wide empty streets and overgrown vacant lots full of quick, shy cats and a brick-framed slice of ocean where each street ends. I wandered with a camera and shot local characters telling stories about the neighborhood. I wove the stories into a film that we played on on the street at the closing party.

The first was 99 Cent Dreams Everything 99 Cents … or More!, a ghetto bargain store the size of a small airport.

I whipped up a crude and bumpy bike-cam before dawn one day and went for a ride.

And there aren’t too many place where you can throw up this much graffiti in peace.

The Heliphon is a robotic metallophone intended to accompany a Balinese gamelan orchestra.  In Balinese gamelan, the higher an instrument’s pitch, the faster it is played, culminating in blazing interlocking parts played with fierce precision.  Only a robot could play faster.  Hence the Heliphon.

It was built by Leila Madrone and further upgraded and mutated by Giles Hall and others.  I was its most recent caretaker, and author of its current control software.

Here’s a taste of its speed – Belle Labs written and performed by Evan Ziporyn

The Blo-bot is my first robot for Ensemble Robot. It’s a tetrahedron of pneumatic cylinders and modified organ pipes that makes music as it slithers and flexes among it’s 64 (2^6) possible shapes.  I was interested in the relationship between music and geometry.

Sadly, I don’t have any audio recordings of the guy.  It had a richly nasal, winsome and harmonious tone punctuated by the percussive clacking of the air cylinders. Here’s a video of it before it found its voice.

It was featured in shows at MassMoCA, the Wired NextFest, and the Boston Museum of Science.   I’m honestly not certain where it is anymore.  If you see it out there, please send it home.

I got to be the hero of my 12-year-old self by playing the Van De Graaff and two half-million-volt Tesla coils in the performance. The crackling arcs were sonically fun, but the bristling purple coronas were best – full of rich textures and rhythms.

You can hear some of Part 7 of  of Christine Southworth’s composition here:

Tell us that story. You know, the one about how you got that scar; about why you can never trust a dentist; about how your grandmother got her last wish in the most unexpected way. Tell us why you stopped taking your dog’s medication; how you lost your one true love; how you got him back. Tell us that one that starts with a bad haircut and ends in a jail cell. Tell us why you always look embarrassed when somebody says the word “kumquat”. Tell us how you finally found your mother.

And that’s how we got a whole web of interconnected strangers to get physically and metaphorically naked and and tell us a story in The Red Chair.

At first I was worried that we were just going to get a bunch of self-centered “craziest thing that ever happened to me” stories. But I think the nakedness changed how people felt. Almost everyone told stories of birth, death and family. All together, they make a powerful network of narrative.

The Boston/Cambridge area has a preponderance of artists, engineers, and just plain freaks who build things. What happens if you put ‘em all in a pot and stir ‘em up? I wanted to find out. And a Tallbike Rodeo seemed like a perfect juncture of art, engineering, and daredevil badass-ness.

The idea lounged around in the back of my head for a while. But it became a reality when Lisa Monrose from the Museum of Science took it on as a project. She got people working and even wrangled some grant money and sponsorship.

What we didn’t know was that all the tallbike freaks already knew each other through SCUL. And there was a lot of suspicion among them that we were trying to co-opt their home-grown culture to promote some corporate agenda. Heavens forefend!

Eventually we met with Fleet Admiral Skunk of SCUL who turned out to be an awesome and genuinely sweet guy. He saw that we were just working to promote creativity and ingenuity through bicycle culture. And he could totally get behind that. So we had Skunk to thank for the ten tallbikes and riders who showed up for the big day!

So anyway …. races, obstacles, and a demolition derby — all on tallbikes. What could possibly go wrong? Enjoy the photos. Many were taken by Monica Parker-James.

What is the Busycle? You’ll just have to see:

That thing is *so* not even hardly street legal. So we were concerned about police as well as high-speed mechanical mayhem. But the St. Patrick’s Day Parade had just happened in South Boston that day, which apparently changed the rules. The police seemed to think we were just some part of the celebration on our way home. So we somehow got a pass as long as they thought we were all drunk revelers rather than sober engineers and artists.

Some time ago, we hosted a best-birthday-ever for the lovely and awesome Robin Amer. This featured two, count ‘em two, marching bands: The Stick and Rag Village Orchestra and the What Cheer? Brigade. What Cheer? was so new they didn’t have a name yet. But they rocked the party like no rock band could have.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

After both bands played, they osmotically blended into one big pounding, honking, gyrating band and marched out of Nervebox Studio into surrounding Chinatown, bringing the party to the people. They marched back in 20 minutes later with more people than they’d left with.

But I miss the people. So I’ve re-joined Ensemble Robot!

This summer I’m building a control system for musical robot for musical robots. My group at the MIT Media Lab needs it. By sharing it with Ensemble Robot, I can field-test it for the Media Lab folks.

And I must confess, I miss the bots too.

I’ve been experimenting with my bike-cam. It’s so easy and fun I want everyone to do it! All together now – Just put a digital camera on a cheap tripod, and use some zip ties to strap the tripod and bicycle frame together in various compromising positions.

What you see here is a compilation of some sweet camera tests. This summer I hope to make some completely bicycle-based films. Maybe even a musical. Everyone on bikes: actors, cameras, crew. Daredevil traffic situations, breathless dialog, and a nice bicycle kiss at the end. So stay tuned.