Dual-function Interfaces: the traditional musical instrument and/as samplers

‘Sampler/Instrument’ is a collaboration between composers Olly Sellwood and Jamie Howell which uses mostly ‘off-the-shelf’ technologies to create dual-function devices that embed live sampling capabilities into traditional musical instruments. Extending musical instruments into sampling devices increases the capacities of both how we perform and perceive these familiar instruments, opening up creative possibilities. The technology forms a system for music composition and performance which engages with both of the composers’ research interests: live sampling; notated and open score approaches; and the extension, transformation, and adaptation of how traditional musical instruments are experienced by audiences and performers. The aim of this fifteen-minute presentation and subsequent fifteen-minute performance is to describe the technology, discuss the broader implications and contexts for our work, explain what makes it unique, and demonstrate pieces created within the project.

Our work repurposes traditional musical instruments as dual-function interfaces: 1) the unaltered instrument, and 2) as live sample capture and playback devices. Through this practice, we are interested in extending the capabilities of traditional musical instruments by adapting the sounds they make without altering how the instruments are played. As such, the intervention in this relationship occurs at the ‘sounding’ point of the output of the instruments; for example, the piano produces piano notes but also controls the sampling and playback of live sounds taken from other instruments involved in the same performance; in this model, the piano is both instrument and sampler.

Live sampling is an established practice in the worlds of EDM, Improvised music, and Contemporary Experimental music; for example, Bernhard Lang’s Loop Generator, Pauline Oliveros’s Expanded Instrument System, and work at the IRCAM in France. Triggering sample playback from traditional instruments is also a common practice, but live sampling controlled by musical instrument triggers is a less developed area with rich possibilities. In addition to extending some of these established practices, our research provides examples which can help to interrogate the relationship between traditional musical instruments and digital controllers, introduced by Thor Magnusson through the discussion of ergomimetic properties of digital musical instruments (2019). Our work can also be helpfully contextualised by frameworks established by Mark Butler in his research on live improvised laptop performance (2014). His ideas concerning the importance of ‘hands-on’ controllers for electronic music, and his ‘text, work, performance’ model of open works which use recorded material in performance illuminate some of the issues raised by our research.

The technology we are using can be seen as a systematic approach to performance and composition and, as it involves modest interventions in existing technologies, has the possibility of being adopted by others for the purpose of creating future works. This project was originally aimed at ourselves as composers and performers, but we have begun to expand to include other artists - an example of which we would like to perform in addition to our presentation. We are excited at the possibility that the ideas we have produced may have a life of their own outside our own work.