Muses machine
This work allows visitors to create musical compositions while different objects and geometric figures appear on screen according to the three musical scales mapped onto the keyboard. Alongside rhythms, sounds and musical variations created specifically for the Muses Machine using a Yamaha Clavinova CLP-380 piano and Logic Pro X, some keys trigger fragments from a sentence by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice. The words appear on screen as a voice reads them aloud.
Even before the machine becomes available, clicking the green flag starts a cascade of words down the centre of the stage. A male voice reads them over suspenseful sounds, inviting the visitor to press any key and begin creating. The message is: “Press any key to boot the Muses Machine.”
From that point onwards, whoever approaches the Muses Machine can press whichever keys attract them at that moment and build a range of different results.
They can hear individual musical notes or variations on those notes across three scales. In the first, each note is accompanied by coloured circles at the centre of the stage, their colours corresponding both to the musical scale and to the chromatic sequence of the rainbow. In the second, coloured blocks associated with each note appear in randomly generated sizes and travel across the screen from a random point of origin to a random destination. In the third, sonic variations are accompanied by randomly generated coloured polygons.
Other keys simply add different rhythms to the creation, while pressing the space bar erases any polygons currently visible on screen.
The keys that trigger fragments of Jane Austen’s text are separate from those that generate sounds. If the sequence were typed in the correct order — something the viewer is not told, because the intention is to encourage spontaneity, creativity and exploration — the full quotation could be read and heard: “I cannot fix / on the hour, / or the spot / or the look / or the words / which laid the foundation. / It is too long ago. / I was in the middle / before / I knew / that / I had begun.”
Each fragment of Austen’s words is set in a different typeface. The text appears at the top of the stage and slides down until it disappears beyond the bottom, while a female voice reads it aloud. I chose this sentence because, so often, when we are inside a creative process, inspiration is not outside us: it is already within, and has already travelled part of the path towards creating something before we become aware that the process has begun.
The idea behind the project is to create a Muses Machine that allows us to experiment, investigate and search for inspiration. Rather than leading towards a single finished work, the piece is created through the interaction of whoever presses the keys. Everything that appears on screen is also ephemeral: it lasts for a time and then disappears, either because it is erased (the polygons), hidden (the blocks and circles), or slides beyond the bottom of the stage (the words).
In this way, the work reinforces the idea of creation itself: a space for inspiration rather than a device for producing a permanent object. At the same time, the experiment plays with the user’s sense of surprise, memory, curiosity and willingness to explore.