ANDY CAVATORTA
(VOICEOVER): They say
that every new
technology has some
potential military application.
But I like to think that
most new technologies
seem to have musical
possibilities
and applications also.
[music playing]
For about 300
years, the pipe organ
was the most complex thing
that human beings were making.
So it was the pinnacle
of technology.
And if you were
living in the 1700s
and you were some
sort of genius,
you couldn't engineer
microchips or a spacecraft.
But you could work
on pipe organs.
The type of art that
I make involves sound
and it involves machinery.
And I do both of those things
together because I'm really
fascinated by this
experience where objects
appear to have this inner life.
The dervishes is the name
for a musical instrument.
It has 14 large spinning
sort of wing-like arms.
And each arm has a corrugated
plastic tube on it.
And the tubes are of
different diameters,
and I cut them to different
lengths to tune them.
There are big motors, and
they have sensors on the back
to show exactly where they're
pointing so we can measure
their position and their speed.
And all that is hooked up to
a big stack of software that
controls the voltages
going into the motors
to bring them to very,
very specific speeds.
At certain levels of
energy, it will play
in different sort of modes.
One of them is its
fundamental mode
where you have one
long sound wave that
goes the whole length of it.
And you go a little faster
and it will double up
into two sound waves like this.
And you go a little faster
and it will go into three.
And they go up through what
they call the harmonic series.
So when it comes to new
sort of musical expression,
there's this constant churn
in human history of wanting
to come up with
newer forms of music
and newer forms of expression.
There's this desire to
always be inventing.
But oftentimes, we're
also telling old truths.
But we always want to
say them in a new way
because the world around
that music from 500 years ago
has changed.
So the pyrophone I built because
I wanted to actually hear
what a pyrophone sounds like.
It's a very, very
unusual instrument,
but I didn't invent it.
There are photos of this
beautiful instrument
full of glass tubes
with a little keyboard--
a stately sort of portly man
with a handlebar mustache,
of course, playing it.
And I understand
what the concept is.
He has gas flames
inside these tubes.
The tubes are set to different
lengths and different diameters
to help create different
timbres and different pitches,
similar to an organ on a
smaller scale, except the thing
that actually vibrates in
this case is the flame.
And it's a very different sound.
It's sort of like if
you had a whale fronting
for a death metal band.
[music playing]
The work that we were doing
on it here in my studio
was to use robotic
technologies-- little stepper
motors and little
measurements of about exactly
how far they've gone-- and
carefully measure the ranges
in each tube and where
the timbres change,
how you get different
harmonics at different heights.
And so that's a bunch
of the new research.
So what happens next is
that we're going to have
music that's interactive.
And we're going to have
music that is at least
partially if not
completely generated
by artificial intelligences.
And it's going to exist in
spaces that are somewhere
between the physical
world that we live in now
and the virtual universe.
I hope that music continues
to play a really powerful role
in shaping society and in how
we figure out what is true
and what's meaningful.
[music playing]
