Sound Meets Sculpture and Robotics - Tech+Art | Genius: Picasso

They say that every new technology has some potential military application, but I'd like to think that most new technologies seem to have musical possibilities and applications also. For about 300 years, the pipe organ was the most complex thing that human beings were making. So it was the pinnacle of technology, and if you were living in the 1700s and you were some sort of genius, you couldn't engineer microchips or spacecraft, but you could work on pipe organs.

The type of art that I make involves sound, and it involves machinery, and I do both of those things together because I'm really fascinated by this experience where objects appear to have this inner life. The dervishes is the name for a musical instrument; it has 14 large spinning, sort of wing-like arms. In each arm has a corrugated plastic tube on it, and the tubes are of different diameters. I cut them to different lengths.

No, they are big motors, and they have sensors on the back to show exactly where their point is. We can measure their position or their speed, and all that is hooked up to a big stack of software that controls the voltages going into the motors to bring them to very, very specific speeds. At certain levels of energy, it will play in different sorts of modes. One of them is its fundamental mode, where you have one long sound wave that goes the whole length of it.

You go faster, and it will double up into two sounds like this, and you go a little faster, and that will go into three. They go up through what they call the harmonic series. So when it comes to a new sort of musical expression, there's this constant churn in human history about wanting to come up with newer forms of music and newer forms of expression.

This does this desire to always be inventing, but oftentimes we're also telling old truths. We always want to say them in a new way because the world around that music from 500 years ago has changed. The pyrrha phone I built because I wanted to actually hear what a pyrrha phone sounds like. It's a very, very unusual instrument, but I didn't invent it.

There are photos of this beautiful instrument full of glass tubes with a little keyboard. A stately sort of portly man with a handlebar moustache, of course, playing it. I understand what the concept is; he has gas flames inside these tubes. The tubes are set to different lengths and different diameters to help create different timbres and different pitches, similar to an organ on a smaller scale.

Except the thing that actually vibrates, in this case, is the flame. That is a very different sound. It's sort of like if you have a whale fronting for a death metal band.

The work that we were doing on it here in my studio was to use robotic technologies, little stepper motors, and little measurements of exactly how far they've gone. We carefully measure the ranges in each tube and where the timbres change, how you get different harmonics at different heights. So that's a bunch of the new research.

What happens next is that we're going to have music that's interactive, and we're going to have music that is at least partially, if not completely generated by artificial intelligences. It's going to exist in spaces that are somewhere between the physical world that we live in now and the virtual universe. I hope that music continues to play a really powerful role in shaping society and in how we figure out what is true and what's meaningful.