Everything Is Music to Instrument Inventor Akito van Troyer's Ears The Berklee professors creations collapse boundaries between digital and physical instruments and highlight the sonic potential of everyday objects.
By
John Mirisola
December 11, 2023
Akito van Troyer holds two custom-made musical cubes built for the MM-RT, an instrument he invented in 2016. The cubes, which contain magnets, vibrate and rattle when activated by the instruments electromagnetic surface.
Image by Kelly Davidson
Akito van Troyers latest instrument is not a drum machine, exactly. More like a drumming machine.
Laid out on a table at the Electronic Production and Design (EPD) professors Cambridge workspace, van Troyers briefcase-sized prototype is surrounded by a striking mishmash of objects: containers and lids of all sizes, a box of 3D-printed plastic cups and saucers, an egg shaker, a glass ball, a styrofoam block, two decorative tin pails, a handful of playing card-sized metal plates, and a festive-looking fake pumpkin. Van Troyer has placed an object on each of the instruments eight square pads, which have mechanical actuators that will strike these objects in a programmed sequence when he presses play on the connected MIDI controller.
He hits a button and the instruments surface pings and rattles and shakes and thumps with the found-sound rhythm, which he can alter with further tweaks to buttons and sliders.
The biggest thing this instrument can do is turn everyday objects into musical materials, he says. The result is a kind of dream laboratory for anybody whos ever drummed on random objects and surfaces just to hear how they sound. He calls it the Garakutakara-a play on a Japanese term that means junk treasure. And its the latest development in a series of sonic explorations that have fascinated van Troyer for years.
Akito van Troyers latest musical creation turns everyday objects into programmable percussion sounds.
Image by Kelly Davidson
The Search for New SoundsFor as long as van Troyer has pursued music, he has sought out new sounds and new ways of making those sounds. There are all kinds of music out there, and I wanted to experience them, van Troyer explains. I want to create the most original sounds. Original sound counts when youre making new music.
As an undergraduate studying ethnomusicology at the University of Hawaii, van Troyer focused on Indonesian gamelan music. Gamelan is a rich and complex system filled with instruments, tones, and scales that have developed independently of Western musical traditions. At the same time, he began to explore computer music, and discovered that the two interests could complement each other. For his senior thesis, he used a computer to analyze the sound of each instrument in a gamelan ensemble, then he created a new electronic gamelan composition with the digital versions of those instruments.
Van Troyer took this fascination with the intersection of technology and sound design through the rest of his education, from a masters degree in music technology at Georgia Tech to a second masters and Ph.D. in media arts and sciences from the Media Lab at MIT. He continued to develop new virtual sounds and instruments while also beginning to explore how to use technological tools to make music with physical objects.
Instrument Builder
Akito van Troyer plays the MM-RT.
Image by Kelly Davidson
The first physical instrument van Troyer built was a mechanically augmented cello that took advantage of a small but significant part of the instruments construction. Cellos have a piece called a sound post, a wooden rod inside the body that has a critical influence on the instruments timbre. Knowing this, van Troyer built a robot that changes the sound post position on the fly to change the timbre of the cello as the cello player plays.
Other instruments hes built or collaborated on have included a MIDI-enabled microtonal harpsichord, a percussive geodesic dome, and a tactiloscope-a work-in-progress device that would translate sound into a touchable interface for hearing-impaired users.
Van Troyer also began building instruments with platforms that would strike or resonate materials the musician puts on top of them, like the Garakutakara. Theres another one like this on the table in his workspace that functions differently, sending out electromagnetic pulses that vibrate metal pieces inside the materials he places on the instruments surface. He calls it the MM-RT (which stands for material, magnet, rhythm, and timbre), and it won the Peoples Choice: Most Unusual award at the Guthman New Musical Instrument Competition in 2017.
Watch Akito van Troyer demonstrate his award-winning MM-RT for Atlanta Magazine:
Making ConnectionsRunning through many of van Troyers musical creations is a deep desire to create connection-between the musician and the instrument, between the performer and the audience, and between the sound and the source.
Think about a guitar, he says. When you play it, its in your face: the guitar is right here, and the sound comes from there, and the [performers] gestures directly result in the sound. So it makes sense for the audience members and its fun to watch.
By contrast, he explains, with a conventional electronic musical instrument, the gesture-say, pressing a button on a keyboard or writing a few lines of code on a computer-is separated from the sound it produces, which comes out of a speaker somewhere else. This is the problem van Troyers new instruments are confronting head-on.
Everyday Music
Image by Kelly Davidson
Image by Kelly Davidson
With instruments like the Garakutakara and the MM-RT, van Troyer is bringing the sound closer to the gesture. An audience member can see him place the tin pail on one of the pads, then hear the pail start to pound like a steampunk kick drum. Then, they can watch as he selects the festive
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Everything Is Music to Instrument Inventor Akito van Troyer's Ears The Berklee professors creations collapse boundaries between digital and physical instruments and highlight the sonic potential of everyday objects.
