Frelia

• 2005
• Instrument, Sculpture

• Description

  Barcelona, Spain

  This work explores three ideas: a communal musical instrument played by force, a force applied from a distance, and a real-time computer instrument composed entirely of free sounds. A wood and metal kinetic sculpture, constructed by Robin Mandel serves as the controller for the instrument. This controller is in fact made up of three pairs of aligned pantographs that translate the bodily gestures of the performer into proportionally smaller movements of a digital pen moving on a digital drawing tablet. The movements of the digital pen on the tablet are used as control information for driving three real-time instruments.

  frelia exclusively uses sounds from the freesound project . The sound palette of each of the three instruments is entirely defined by a series of search terms sent to the freesound server and specific filterings of the search results based on the AudioClas analysis data provided with each sound in freesound. This algorithmic manner of choosing one's sounds poses rich possibilities for building maps of sounds, as well as potentially disastrous surprises in the resulting sound palette. Nonetheless, even at this early stage, the riches surpass the catastrophes.

  This project was realized with the kind aid of MTG, IUA-UPF, and Wacom. A PDF flyer for this installation can be found here.

  Also worth noting that what we originally had in mind was something more like this...

• Acknowledgements

  Collaboration with Robin Mandel, sculptor

  Concept: Ali Momeni, Robin Mandel

  Sculptural Design: Robin Mandel

  Interaction Design, Software and Musical Composition: Ali Momeni