This device was commissioned by Arthur Campbell along with a composition by my undergraduate research advisor, Colby Leider. It consists of a five degree of freedom sensor that is mounted onto the bell of Arthur’s clarinet that interfaces with an Arduino microcontroller. The microcontroller interfaces wirelessly through an XBee module to a SuperCollider program written by Mark Freeman, another member of our group. There is also a foot-switch that can trigger different sound samples during the performance.
As the performer moves his or her instrument, the sensor reports its positioning to the software. This software is directly in the loop of the performer’s microphone, so technically it could control any audio effect you could think to program. For our purposes, it allows the performer to spatially pan the sound.
Arthur Cambell, a virtuoso clarinet soloist, is currently taking the device around the country on a tour.
The name of the piece written by my advisor is “Twin Prime Conjecture.” Click here to listen to the debut performance.
From the program notes:
Colby Leider Twin Prime Conjecture
Twin Prime Conjecture was composed for Arthur Campbell in 2009. Twin primes are successive pairs of prime numbers (those numbers that are divisible only by one and themselves) whose difference is two. Of the first few prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37…) only several adjacent pairs exhibit this property: (3, 5), (11, 13), (17, 19), (29, 31). The Twin Prime Conjecture is a famous unsolved mathematical proposal that there exist an infinite number of such pairs; in fact, number theorists have struggled to prove this conjecture since Euclid proposed it more than two millennia ago.
Twin Prime Conjecture treats this by successively considering some of these twin-prime pairs. Over the course of seven movements, the numbers comprising each pair are interpreted either harmonically (in the case of chords tuned to frequency intervals that can be expressed as the ratios of two integers, or N-limit just intonation) or rhythmically (in the case of the number of notes the clarinet plays, or N-tuplets). The work requires the clarinetist to mount a small wireless sensor to the bell of the clarinet, along with a microphone. The sensor transmits information about the movement of the instrument over time; specifically, it communicates the three-dimensional acceleration and two-dimensional gyroscopic tilt of the clarinet to a nearby computer via a wireless link. At times throughout the work, this information is used by the computer to process the sound of the clarinet in real time; at other times, the clarinet can serve as a virtual baton, whereby the performer can cue computer-generated sounds as an orchestral accompaniment.
