Royal College of Art & Yamaha

The Tenori-on shows how Yamaha likes to experiment with musical instruments. At Futuresonic 2009 Yamaha presents a new collection of unusual experimental instruments in collaboration with the Royal College of Art.

With the title ‘Making Fun Serious’ the exhibition shows concepts of the Royal College of Art students. They try to transform the mundane actions of daily life into a music performance. This results in projects like:

The Physical Sequencer (picture above) by Guiseppe Guerriero, is a step sequencer in which the body movements of the user are translated into sound, creating an interesting interaction between movement/dance and sound.

Typing the Sound by Fabien Capello: a project where “the skills we developed in typing text on a keyboard are turned into a musical ability”. Basically it’s just a typewriter which acts like a piano. It doesn’t always sound great, but typing bad text might result in beautiful music.

The Knitting Scanner by Azusa Murakami reads the patterns in knitted garments and translates them into music. It seems like a very slow way of creating a musical score. I’m not impressed by the sound it generates either.

These are just a few examples of the works. While the Futuresonic festival has come to an end, the exhibition is still open for public until the 23rd of May. You can see all the projects at the Yamaha website.