The Arrogant Worms Orchestra

•

The Arrogant Worms Orchestra is a real time and interactive sound installation that I made in the context of the class of advanced new media art at the UNA (National University of Art) Buenos Aires, Argentina.

This sound installation started as an ironic joke about the academic context of contemporary music and was built it to be executed by earthworms in order to achieve an automatic and interactive sound piece that does not require the presence of a human user that stimulates it.

The design of the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) serves as a visual metaphor for the position of musicians in an orchestra of classical music. The design repeats the arrangement of the main orchestra instruments. Thus, each section has its own space on the circuit board.

This sound piece was programmed using Pure data and composed by a division of six main instruments.
Each group contains three types of sound characters: melodic, rhythmic and noisy.

- The melodic sounds are samples of audio keynotes.
- The rhythmic samples are iterated.
- The noise samples contain variations in frequencies, timbre and amplitude.

Each of the 6 instruments has 24 different sounds, which makes a total of 144 sound samples that compose the piece in the elapse of time.

The piece can be manipulated through different sources like worms or insects walking on the board, such as any kind of source whose presence activates the capacitive sensors of which the interface is made. These sensors activate the samples of each instrument, triggering sounds that are bound to a pre-written musical structure. Inside that structure you can find different logical settings and commands such as “solo string instruments”, “solo piano”, “solo percussion”, “percussion and piano”, among others, as well as other timbre characteristics like “loud piano with melodic violin” or “rhythmic cellos with noisy percussion”, etc.