Hi, Glen here, This will be an ongoing blog series reflecting on the last 7 years of Playable Streets by exploring the 17 new works that we have created so far.
#1 The Plants
In 2015 I was obsessed with videos of people playing bananas like a piano. ‘What is this surreal and ridiculous alchemy?’ I must try it for myself! I bought an arduino and an extra sensor that would allow me to connect anything conductive to trigger sounds on a computer. I was hooked on this idea that anything could become a musical instrument. As someone who has played instruments (guitar, bass) most of my life I knew how fun they could be, but also how frustrating and rigid. I was constantly tinkering with guitars - changing how i strung them, plugging them into the video input of tvs or adding other sound making elements to them (none of these tricks helped me play any better btw😉).
“There is something about creating dynamic sound with purely organic interactions that is unexpected and exciting.”
A mate from Bristol, Daniel Clark (fantastic musician and voice!) was in Melbourne and we were riffing on the idea that this technology could make the world more playable, you could make a street playable! This idea stuck in my head like a bindi in a beach towl - that was the seed for Playable Streets.
I had a look online and found the Test Sites program was funding public art experiments so I put in an application, secured the funding and now had to make the thing, eek! Pikkle Henning came to the rescue with his engineering skills and we managed to put together some devices that in theory could turn some street infrastructure into musical instruments. I say in theory because the big day came and we had everything ready to go, it all worked at home so surely it would work out on Swanston Street? It did not.
We put everything together, running so much wire all over the place, copper spaghetti. But then nothing! Or, bits of something but not when it was supposed to happen. Pikkle and I ran around trying to get it working - to no avail. We set up three plants in tin buckets that we knew would work (triggering orchestral music when touched) while we tinkered and rubbed our eyes.
Participants playing ‘The Plants’ on Swanston St in Melbourne (2015)
As we stressed about the other things that we had wired up (to make the street playable!) we kept hearing the orchestral plants chiming away and passers by both interacting with them and watching others interact. People were actually jamming, playing, collaborating, laughing, and taking photos.
Pikkle and I stopped worrying about the other stuff and began to engage with participants instead, fielding questions on how it worked and playing along on The Plants.
This Test Sites showing was the beginning of The Plants and Playable Streets. This work also led to our relationship with ArtSpace Ringwood where we developed In Touch, Sounding Stories, Touchable Sounds and Islands.
The next step was to see what these plants could really do, for that we were off to the Abbotsford Convent!
Long time friend and musical collaborator Cayn Borthwick and I locked ourselves in a small room in the Convent with the goal of turning those 3 plants into a musical instrument. The sonic possibilities were endless and we experimented with hundreds of combinations. In the end we landed on 12 plants playing piano in the harmonic scale, a synthesizer and nature sounds (birds etc). Our focus was on creating sounds that could be played either simultaneously or individually by participants without creating too much of a cacophony.
Participants playing The Plants Abbotsford Convent (2017)
We presented the 12 plants on the grounds of the Abbotsford convent over a weekend and made many discoveries (outlined in my Masters Thesis).
The most important discovery was that folks seemed to love playing plants! There is something about creating dynamic sound with purely organic interactions that is unexpected and exciting.
We presented The Plants in this format at MPavillion (City) and were commissioned to create a new version of The Plants for MPavillion Monash. With our observations in hand we went about re designing the housing for the plants and the sounds that they triggered. We also developed a workshop that asked participants to create unique musical notation for these unique musical instruments.
The Plants & The Person at Melbourne Music Week (2109)
Over the next 3 years The Plants travelled to Penrith, Canberra and across regional Victoria, every season delivering new insights and advances. In 2019 we presented The Plants ELECTROGROW as part of SWELL 5.0 at Melbourne Music Week. Working with some of our favourite local independent electronic artists (The Person, Cayn Borthwick, Bribery) we developed a system that would allow participants to interact directly with the artists’ musical performance. The audience became participant, collaborator and improvisor. It was exciting to experience this party of electronic music and energetic plant playing! More please!
The future of The Plants will focus on more this kind of collaboration, with participants and musicians coming together and making some beautiful music together.
You can see / read more about The Plants here.
If you are interested in presenting The Plants, collaborating with us or just want to say hi drop us a line: hello@playablestreets.com
If you would like to keep up to date with Playable Streets join our Mailing List