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Interview:The Fragmented Orchestra

1 Sep 2008

The Fragmented Orchestra, an ingenious and intriguing new project from Jane Grant, John Matthias and Nick Ryan, has won this year's PRS Foundation's New Music Award. The award, heralded as music's equivalent of the Turner Prize, has garnered high praise from MPs, artists and the media, and Take it away was lucky enough to speak to John Matthias about the project and winning such a prestigious award.

Nick Ryan, John Matthias and Jane Grant celebrate upon hearing that they have been awarded the New Music Award 2008 (C) Will Strange

First though, here's what The Fragmented Orchestra is about. The pioneering composition will mirror the function of the human brain and the way it processes sound, using state of the art technology, and more than a little know-how (it's creators are all physicists as well as artists). It will work by 24 ‘neuron units' being placed across the UK in specially chosen locations, including a football stadium, cathedral, dairy farm, school playground, motorway crash barrier and a field. As each of the ‘neurons' are stimulated by sound, created by both the public and the elements, they will select audio fragments to be streamed across an invisible network or cortex created between them.  The cortex will form a living instrument, which interprets the fragments of sound as music.

The cortex of 24 fragmented audio channels will then flow to a central space at FACT, Liverpool. Visitors to FACT will be able to listen via 24 speakers to the collective sounds from each site and their interaction with each other. This performance can also be heard at each of the 24 ‘neuron' sites, as well as online.

The people behind it are Jane Grant, a visual artist working with film, sound, video and installation; John Matthias, a musician and physicist who has worked with many artists including Radiohead, Matthew Herbert and Coldcut, and has performed extensively in Europe including at the Pompidou Centre, Paris; and Nick Ryan, a composer, producer and sound designer who has won a BAFTA for his ground breaking interactive radio drama The Dark House, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and has composed extensively for film and television.

John Matthias

Take it away chatted to one of the creators, John Matthias, about the project:

Tia: How did you meet Nick Ryan and Jane Grant?

JM: Jane Grant is an artist who is also a colleague at the University of Plymouth. We have been collaborating on Neuronally Triggered Instruments for about two years now. Jane and research assistant, Tim Hodgson recently developed an interface for an instrument called the Neurogranular Sampler, which I invented with Prof. Eduardo Miranda. This instrument triggers tiny grains of sound when artificial neurons all within one computer fire. Jane used this instrument to generate all of the sound for a film called Threshold which is currently exhibited at the ArtSway Gallery in the New Forest as part of a show called Just World Order. The original sounds came from breathing.

Nick and I have been collaborating for about 10 years now. He produced my first album, Smalltown, Shining  and we wrote an orchestral work recently called Cortical Songs  which has just been released on the Nonclassical record label. This is a work for a string orchestra in which each member of the orchestra follows a score and a light which flashes when an artificial cortical neuron in a computer fires. When the musician sees the light flash, they have instructions about what to do next. The release on Nonclassical contains remixes by Thom Yorke, from Radiohead, Simon Tong and (previous PRS Foundation New Music Award Winner) Jem Finer among others.

Tia: How did the idea for the collaboration come about?

JM: The Fragmented Orchestra and the collaboration have come about through several years of working and developing related projects. Jane has been interested in site-based work for a number of years, and all three of us have been interested in the ideas behind neuronal triggering and plasticity and what this means in terms of our own perception. It was therefore a natural extension of several ideas that were already hanging around. The PRS New Music Award gave us a focus to put together something really ambitious.

Tia: What kind of impact do you expect from the public's interaction?

JM: We hope that the public will be intrigued. We have already had some incredibly positive reactions from many quarters. One thing that we hope will happen is that members of the public might use the sound boxes to communicate with each other via the adaptive spiking neuronal audio system. If we can get people to play with and use the system without us having anything to do with it, it will be great!

Tia: Are you still taking suggestions of locations for the 24 sites?

JM: Yes, absolutely! We are particularly looking for some more sites in Scotland and Wales.

 

To watch a short film about The Fragmented Orchestra visit the PRS Foundation website: www.prsfoundation.co.uk/newmusicaward

To suggest locations, visit: http://www.thefragmentedorchestra.com/

 

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