Philosophical Statement

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of ”culture.”
- John Cage (American avant-garde composer, 1912-1992)

Syzygryd is a town square for the collaborative creation of music. It’s a public space, it’s a sculpture, and it’s a musical instrument. It’s the most beautiful expression we can imagine of the joy we take in community, music, technology, fire, sculpture and architecture.

We have assembled an international team of artists with extraordinary talent and experience. All of us are in love. Every day we see things that no one has yet imagined, and it’s been our delight to work within a community to make them real. We’d like to create a space in our city where others — people who don’t normally do this sort of thing — can feel at least a little of that.

Syzygryd is a collaborative musical instrument for three non-professional players. We are not naive. We’re not shoving guitars into the hands of novices and expecting symphonies. This is a very carefully designed canvas that guides beginners to harmony (in fact, discordant notes are literally impossible.) The interface is rhythmic, visual, and dead simple. We’ve been meticulously developing the software for months, playing with iPhone prototypes on busses, tweaking sounds, testing it out on our friends. We knew we were getting warmer the first time that three people, with no formal training in music, got bystanders grooving involuntarily…

But it’s not just the music. We see a plaza, a town square, a concert hall, something between architecture and sculpture. The experience of creation needs a place, a public forum that brings people together. We’ve taken everything that we know about form and light and become architects, sketching out a space for a very specific purpose. Syzygryd is synaesthetic: notes activate flame and light effects. The space evolves with the music — you can see the rhythms resonate and reverberate through the space. This is an architecture for creation. Even quiescent, during the day, the purpose of the place is obvious: three control stations, at ground level for anyone to use, facing each other for collaborative use.

Humans have always made music together with whatever instruments they had. Bones became flutes, hides became drums. A hundred years ago the symphony orchestra was the pinnacle of musical collaboration. Then came the electric guitar and the four-piece band. Our community today, our city in the desert, is inextricably linked with the rise of electronic music, but it’s no longer enough to have crowds cheering for the performer. Dancing together is good stuff, but we’re not so keen on the concept of an audience. It’s time our interactive metropolis had an interactive concert hall.

Interactivity

Three control stations are arranged at equidistant points around a 60′ diameter circle. Participants use these controls to visually compose the music of a single instrument as part of a constantly evolving 3-part ensemble. The controllers have synchronized timing, and each displays the other participants’ work as well. Distance keeps speech from being heard, but communication takes place via the shared musical composition.

The controllers use an established pentatonic scale, which produces a harmonious chord for every possible combination of buttons. Our testing has shown the grid sequencer interface to be intuitive enough that people can learn it in minutes with no instruction. By constraining timing, pitch, and harmony, most of the difficult aspects of musical composition are automatically maintained. In many ways, it’s easier than singing. The participant is free to immediately compose interesting melodies and complex rhythms, and play them live. Making good music becomes a game — one anyone can play.

The entire sculpture responds dynamically to this soundtrack through synchronized lighting and flame effects.

Crew members carry small wireless touchscreen devices to offer to random participants within the installation. These are used to further sculpt the music by dynamically altering the color and texture of the sound.

Suites of instruments are created prior to the event by professional musicians, and are chosen by crew members to fit the mood of the space, or pre-programmed to match the time of day and environmental conditions.

We will also invite live collaboration. Imagine an event wherein a professional musician plays a set, but is only providing half of the music: the character and tone of the sounds. Rhythms and melodies are provided by participants in real-time.

While fire and light effects only run at night, the control interfaces and music generation continue 24 hours a day.

Dimensions

Syzygryd’s has a 60′ diameter circular footprint. The sculpture is 13′ at its highest point. There is a separate 20’ x 20’ fenced area for the propane fuel depot, generator and staging, located 30′ from the area defined by the sculpture.

Music, as expressed in the Gryd Controller, exists as a series of individual notes visualized as square buttons. Extrude these square buttons into three dimensions and you have our basic sculptural building block: the cube. Each individual controller-station consists of a series of metal cubes stacked haphazardly on the ground. The cubes seem to rise into the air above you. As they pass the controller surface, they are filled with colored light and appear to be drawn, faster and faster, toward the center of the circle. Reaching the center, the three lines converge and their musical energy tumbles together. They spin into a giant tornado of cubes, warping into a mass of intersecting faces and edges, jumbled together to form a chaotic sum that is more than its parts, but each line retaining its own distinct identity.

The cube faces are arranged such that they don’t quite meet, and the cubes are lit from the inside. Light spills out from all the edges, creating the impression of a 3-dimensional wireframe drawing. Additional ambient lighting is provided by LED fill lights.

The three control stations are assigned three respective colors, which flood the control panel area and the corresponding line of cubes extending into and making up the central sculpture. This helps to reinforce the visual metaphor of notes converging from three separate points to form a unified whole. All lights and flame effects in a segment are sequenced to respond to the music being produced by its panel. As the texture of the music evolves, the colors shift to provide a visual reflection of the change.

Materials

Syzygryd is made primarily of metal: a powder-coated carbon steel framework supports the sheet aluminum cubes, and acts as a conduit for running power, fuel lines, and signal wires. The cubes contain numerous RGB LEDs, shining light through bead-blasted acrylic rods at the mating surfaces of cube faces. No acrylic is used in the fire-containing cubes. We intend to purchase as much of our steel and aluminum as possible from metal recyclers.

Flame effects are made using standard gas-handling hardware: rated LPG hose, standard steel accumulator tanks, normally-closed solenoid valves, etc. The central flame tornado effect is made using a large stainless steel tube, custom louvers to create a circular gas vortex, and a high-volume variable-speed fan. We will use recycled or remanufactured products wherever possible, so long as this does not compromise safety in any way

The Gryd Controller consists of a custom translucent acrylic button overlay for a 37″ HDTV. Light produced by the display is visible through the buttons, and is used to indicate button status and generate user interface feedback. The buttons actuate snap-action switches. An attached computer interprets control signals and drives the display. The computer and screen are sealed behind a weather-resistant membrane.

Speakers consist of a set of modest powered drivers. In addition, small consumer-level 2.1 systems serve as monitors at the control panels, and low-frequency transducers attached to the platforms help to accentuate the bass without generating uncomfortable sound levels.

The choice of LED lighting is important for saving power, reducing maintenance, and providing complete flexibility in color selection for any given sculpture element.

We have chosen to use standard electronics and signal protocols wherever possible. All lights are controlled via Digital Multiplexing (DMX). Cube lighting controllers are custom Arduino-based LED drivers, and ambient light is produced by commercially manufactured DMX fill lights. All controller communication uses the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol, running over ethernet or wifi.

Custom software is developed using Processing. Sound is produced using Ableton Live with a variety of sampler and software synth plugins.

All control and lighting interface details, including software source code, CAD models, custom electronics designs, and circuit board layouts will be released as open-source and open-hardware projects, using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial License or the GNU General Public License. We intend to work with artists to adapt and evolve the Gryd Controller into a hybrid tactile-visual performance instrument platform usable for any media artist.

Sound

The primary purpose of Syzygryd is to create a synesthetic soundscape environment for participants to modify and enjoy.

The sound system will consist of 6 speakers in a 360 degree array, located at the center of the sculpture. Speakers are placed to guarantee a consistent, audible volume level throughout the sculpture without any single speaker being overly loud. Additional small sound systems are placed at each of the three controller stations to provide independent monitoring, with a slight emphasis placed on their own current instrument.

Syzygryd will have an auditory impact on surrounding art installations and should be placed appropriately. Ideally we would be located at least 200 feet from other installations to prevent interference, and 400 feet from any major soundsystem so that the music can be clearly heard. We do not intend to function as a large sound camp, but rather a responsive musical environment in which participants can enjoy the music, but can still easily converse with one another without having to yell.

Fire

In the center of the sculpture, protected by the cube-spiral arms and safely overhead is a colorful fire tornado, which mirrors the metal tornado beneath it. The center is also populated with a set of mid-sized accumulator effects.

10 cubes in each of the three lines contain propane flames in addition to lighting. Each has a continuously-burning effect that outlines the cube faces in fire, and a large effect that creates a percussive fireball. Cube fire is sequenced in time with the music.

The primary fuel is propane, lit using hot-surface ignitors. Secondary fuel is methanol, colored with various metal salts. Failsafe controls are used on all effects, and an integrated anemometer disarms effects automatically as wind speed increases. All fire is well overhead, safely out of reach of participants.

Fire effects are only operated at night when the installation is attended by qualified crew members.

Leave No Trace

Much attention has been paid during design to minimize buried materials. Trenching will be required to run power and fuel from the maintenance depot to the installation, with an estimated trench length of 60 feet. A system of radial trenches will also be required for the central structure’s ground anchor, with a cumulative trench length of 48 feet. Overall trench length is 108 feet. The remainder of the sculpture elements are designed to stand without significant ground anchors.

During the event, the crew will perform a daily cleanup sweep of the site including a 30 foot buffer beyond the sculpture and fuel depot. While the leave-no-trace ethos is strongly established within the Burning Man community, we are keenly aware that a large interactive music, light and fire installation will gather the inevitable detritus that comes with heavy traffic. We have both the intent and the infrastructure to deal with participants’ MOOP left at our site, and will do so on a daily basis.

Following removal of the installation, all trenches and holes will be re-packed with moist playa material, tamped down, and graded. The area surrounding the sculpture will be carefully searched in a DPW-style grid sweep to remove MOOP.

We believe that the traces we leave can extend well beyond the desert surface. The total carbon footprint for Syzygryd’s BM10 run, including all aspects of transport and operation, is estimated at 10.25 tons GHG. In spring 2007, after consultation with the California Department of Forestry, Interpretive Arson trekked to a secluded part of the Sierra Nevada to plant 2000 native-species trees on protected, privately-owned, previously-deforested land. Land, trees, and labor were all provided by IA members. Standard estimates put our current offset at 400 tons GHG. All previous IA activity has a total carbon footprint of 64.25 tons GHG, leaving a 325.5 ton balance after BM10. Plans are being made for a future expedition to keep our fire art solidly carbon-negative.