REALITY CHECK - A SEMI-INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION
WARREN BURT
"Art is to serve as an antienvironment, a probe that makes the environment visible."
-Marshall McLuhan, 1968
The midifile downloadable from here is the output of half an hour of the operation of an installation called "Reality Check" which was at the "Sonic Residues" show at the Linden Gallery, St. Kilda, Melbourne, in December 1997. It probably will sound "best" on a Roland Sound Canvas series synthesizer, but I've also tried it on other general Midi compatible synths, and it still sounds something like what I envisioned. The standard pitch bend range setting on most synths is set to +/- 2 semitones. If you set your synth to a different setting, you can hear different microtonal tunings than the one I heard, which might be fun.
At the Linden installation, people entered a small room in which there was a small table with the computer on it, and on the mantlepiece above the fireplace were two small domestic computer loudspeakers wrapped in barbed wire. People were enticed to enter the room by a sign explaining the installation - they had to walk through the doorway to get to the sign, and their entering the room triggered off changes in what they heard.
Here is the text of what the sign said:
Most interactive installations and games try to create a sense of fantasy or personal power in an imaginary world. This installation, on the other hand, tries to represent a reality: the reality of dealing with the bureaucratic, academic, commercial or establishment worlds.
When you enter and leave the room, you break a sensor beam, just as you do when you use an automatic door. This changes many aspects of the music - speed, instruments, ranges, etc. Likewise, when you leave the room, the music also changes. While you're in the room, though, you have no control whatever over the sound. Just like dealing with a bureaucracy or establishment, see? You can change it by joining it, or leaving it, but once inside - it's more powerful than you. Change from the inside, that myth beloved of reformists everywhere, is here revealed as the sham it truly is. Observation and learning remain our only weapons.
Further, once you're in the room, the music may be seductive, but it's based on chaos, and even though it might sound repetitive at times, its behaviour is fairly unpredictable - again, just like a bureaucracy! And to top it all off, the music uses a very strange random tuning system, so that even though it occasionally sounds sweet, or almost normal, it actually has nothing to do with either common sense or everyday reality. Does this sound familiar?
(Technical notes for those interested: The interactive device was a Bucha Lightning infrared motion to MIDI converter. The computer was a Toshiba Pentium laptop running John Dunn's Kinetic Music Machine software, which controlled a Roland Sound Canvas synthesizer. The internal logic of the music was provided by an emulation in software of a "shift-register feedback" circuit, which was the basis for much "random" information generation in the electronic music of the 1970s. The output of this circuit exhibits many chaotic characteristics. This logic was later incorporated into John Dunn's "SoftStep", as the "Burt Shift" option in the "Chaos" module. (http://algoart.com) The tuning system is indeed truly random. Each pitch is transposed by a different random amount within a range of +/- 2 semitones. Tuning then, remains continually variable and unpredictable.)
Click here to download the midifile of "Reality Check" (47kb)