Chairs Made Musical
By Eli Han.
elihan@u.northwestern.edu.
For Digital Musical Instrument Design at Northwestern.
Personal website here.
An introduction
I wanted to create an interactive instrument that would promote collaboration and curiosity among multiple users.
And in thinking about music and a digital musical space, I was reminded of the childhood game of "musical chairs."
It was a bit of a stressful game for kid me, being fairly small and unathletic and push-able.
But I remember being very competitive about it nonetheless - I was invested in this silly game.
I realized that musical chairs was quite formative to me.
It encouraged me to listen more carefully to music, to be aware of those around me, and to be active.
So in the same vein of musical chairs, I created an interactive and collaborative instrument that facilitates a unique realization of a piece of music by a group of players: "Chairs Made Musical."
Three chairs were arranged in a semi-circle in an installation space.
A musical sample ("Furniture Music" by Erik Satie) played from nearby speakers.
Each chair acted as a trigger controlling a different aspect of that piece’s sound such that the players could create new music by altering their sitting positions.
The chairs were rigged as continuous controllers by using soft potentiometers adhered to the seats, which were wired to an Arduino Uno, which communicated to a Max patch.
The players situated themselves on the chairs, and the pressure that they exerted on the various points of the potentiometers affected the sound output.
One chair controlled the sample's playback speed, another controlled the interpolation of this playback, and the last controlled the master gain of the music.
This setup meant that the players were essentially playing music by using their butts!
In practice, the chairs were rather difficult to play.
I was surprised to find that the barrier to entry I had intended to be accessible was actually the opposite in some ways.
The potentiometers were rather finicky, and made it difficult for players to produce smooth readings.
Users' gestures, even when consciously minimal, affected the sound output in extreme ways.
Thanks to this unexpected sensitivity with the interface, the generated music was definitely new and interesting.
The players did gradually become more familiar and more adept with their seats.
Importantly, there isn’t any “winning” or “losing” with this instrument.
Players are never eliminated.
The chairs are simply a means of controlling the musical output, so this instrument is not competitive - it’s cooperative.
I wanted the instrument to create a “casual game” environment so that different players could have fun discovering what controls were available, and creatively take advantage of them.
The player experience was always my first and foremost concern with "Chairs Made Musical."
A performance
The beginning of a "Chairs Made Musical" performance is available here.