Iain Mott: Music Of The Sphere

Abstract

Music of the Sphere is a composition built from a series of live interactions I made in The Talking Chair, recorded with binaural microphones. The Talking Chair is a public sculpture enabling individuals to determine, through gesture, both the musical qualities of sound and its motion through a three-dimensional space. Recorded fragments of spatial gestures were edited and overlaid to produce the final composition. My intention in Music of the Sphere was to produce an idealised composition of the sculpture as a work for public interaction. Music of the Sphere is an imaginary spatial landscape in a state of constant flux. Sound streams are presented as individual mobile objects each with differing mass, shape, and surface characteristics. Interaction between streams was facilitated by the editing process which juxtaposed spatial gestures in sympathetic counterpoint and gave the composition shape.