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Variations
Interactive Music Installation
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Jan Mensaert: 1937-1990 Exhibition
Museum het Toreke, Tienen, Belgium
April 11-June 10, 2001
This installation was part of the exhibition "Jan Mensaert:1937-1990." Jan Mensaert was a Belgian composer, poet and painter. I was
commissioned to record several pieces of his music and to create an interactive music installation for the exhibition. The final installation
consisted of four modules; each composed of a cube, cylinder and sphere. Inside each cube are a CD player and a speaker. For this
installation, there are four channels of music being played. The music is a combination of selections from the only remaining recording
of Jan Mensaert, my recordings of his music and some of my own music. The music was arranged so that when the spheres are taken
off the cylinders, the music for that channel gets louder. Depending on the number of spheres off at any one time, the people in the
gallery hear different mixes of the music. In addition to the installation, I also did a live performance of Jan Mensaert's and my own
music and poetry.
In the essay, Variations: An Exploration
of the Music of Jan Mensaert, I talk about the earlier piece I created
for the Storm King Music Festival and my theories of visual music.
Here I will talk about the development of the interactive installation at the Museum het Toreke in Tienen.
The process started with a large box containing the1200 pages of music Jan
Mensaert composed during his lifetime. It took me several days to go through
each page of music and decide what I would like to record. During my search,
I decided to look for themes and music that would be accessible. I ended up
with about 75 pages of possible music to record. From there, I selected the
ones that I felt would work in the installation. From the hand-written pages,
I entered the music note by note into the computer using Score Writer software.
This gave me printed sheet music, as well as MIDI files. I then played the
MIDI files through a synthesizer until I found a voice that fit the music.
I then recorded it, sometimes adding tracks of other instruments.
During this time, Margaret Harrell, coordinator of the exhibition, contacted
me with the news that she had found a recording on Jan Mensaert. It was 1/4"
tape on a three-inch reel. She brought the tape to my studio and we copied
it into ProTools software. From there, we made a CD. Over the next few weeks,
I listened to the CD over twenty times to begin to isolate the themes of his
music. The recording started as a performance, but then turned into a "rehearsal
tape" where themes were started and stopped, and certain phrases were worked
on several times in a row, etc. From this recording, I isolated about 10 -
15 themes, from which I chose three. I recorded them and narrowed the final
choice down to nine. I now had 12 pieces of music, which became "The Music
of Jan Mensaert" CD.
What I did next was to create the music for the interactive installation.
I took the different themes and live recordings and spaced them out on two
channels, so that they did not overlap with each other. I then wrote music
to fill in some of the spaces between the music. This music was recorded on
two channels. This now gave me the four channels of music for the installation.
These recordings are on the "Variations 1&2" CD.
The first installation of "Variations" used an iMac computer and a sculpture.
For this installation, I wanted to take it out of the computer and into a
completely sculptural form. I also wanted to create something that several
people in the gallery could interact with. My first idea (which I will make
at some point) was a table with holes in the top through which the music played.
There would be flat pieces of different geometric shapes on the table with
which you could cover and uncover the holes. I'm not exactly sure how it evolved
into the cube, cylinder and cone form, but I think I imagined the piece as
a table and then removed the top of the table. The idea of being able to move
and place the modules in different areas of the gallery also appealed to me.
These two images show the early stages of the development. The scale model
was built as a proof of concept and to give the museum staff in Belgium an
idea of what I wanted.
I also sent them scale drawings of the modules. From there, Yaron Canetti
and Sheng-Fang Chen created a 3D visualization of the piece using Alias Wavefront
Maya software. As you can see from the photograph of the final piece, the
concept visualization was very close to the final piece.
My future plans are to explore this idea further using my own music. Staf
Thomas, the Director of the Museum het Toreke has agreed to loan the work
to galleries and other museums for exhibition. I am planning on building various
modules of different shapes and sizes, as well. I'll also be investigating
the use of DVD for multi-channel music and the potential of adding video to
the sculptures.