On Friday 28 February, Di Mainstone came to the Studio to tell us about her multidisciplinary project Human Harp, which blends fashion, architectural intervention, dance, music and plenty of technological innovation.

Di started off as a fashion designer at Central St Martins, exploring relationships between the body, technology and performance. After CSM, Di worked with a number of technology Studios, including Banff New Media Institute, Montreal XS Labs, MIT Tangible Media Lab, Rotterdam’s V2 Institute and Eyebeam NY (where she came up with the idea for Human Harp). She is now artist in residence at Queen Mary, and is taking her Human Harp project to Bristol in March 2015, tying in with the 150th Anniversary year of Clifton Suspension Bridge, and the opening of its new visitor centre.

Di told us that the more she worked on projects spanning design and performance, the more it seemed right to take her projects out into public spaces to see peoples’ reactions, and play off urban landscapes. Whilst walking in New York, Di felt drawn to Brooklyn Bridge. She would sit on the wooden walkway and see it as a kind of glockenspiel, being played by pedestrians. Taking time to sit and listen, she started to hear and to feel the vibrations of the huge steel cables, and it struck her that the bridge was like a giant harp.

Di started to think of ways that the subtle frequencies of the bridge could be harvested and enhanced by a clip on interface. She wanted to find ways to make the body an extension of the bridge. This is when the Human Harp idea was born. She became fascinated by the bridge’s history, and spoke to a lot of New Yorkers about their experience of it and whether they would be interested in a project aiming to turn the bridge into a giant instrument. She got a lot of support from local people, including a living ancestor of John A. Roebling; the designer of the bridge.

As you can see from this video of the project, Di’s main idea involves harnessing someone to the bridge with retractable cables, which, as they move, pulling and slackening the cables, will manipulate sounds that resonate deep within the structure of the bridge. Di began sketching out the modular system. She decided to make the designs open source, with downloadable patterns that anyone could have access to if they were interested in the project. She worked with Holly, a dancer, to map out where the holsters and appliances should be on the body, and then hosted a workshop with twenty MA students, where they all took part in making and designing the modules. They had a lot to learn in reducing wastage of materials and making sure the design of the components was as stripped down as it could be in order to fit in all the technology. One group of students focused on the design elements of the project, while the others thought about what it means to be a musician, and what it could mean to play a huge architectural structure like the Brooklyn Bridge.

For their first testing session on the Bridge, instead of harnessing Holly to the structure itself, they used a pole with some retractable dog leads attached to it. Although this wasn’t quite the launch they were expecting, it was an invaluable stage in the project’s design development. Observing the way that Holly moved whilst harnessed, and observing peoples reactions to the experiment gave Di and the team an opportunity to reverse engineer the Human Harp components. They filmed Holly and created a score in response to her movements, experimenting with the changes in pitch as she pulled the strings taught and slackened them. They wanted the player’s movements to manipulate the sound in such a way that was intuitive and playful.  

Di worked with the creator of the Gravity Harp, Andy Cavatorta to harvest the sounds of the bridge. They used contact mics and pressed them to the cables, capturing subsonic sounds and processing them to an audible level. After clearing up the distortions, they found out that what they had captured was a rich droning sound, which you will be able to listen to on the Human Harp website very soon.

There are still lots of questions that Di and her team are asking themselves. They are looking into how they can improve the sensor data of the control module, and capture and manipulate the sound in real time. They are also looking at creating a lot of new components such as wearable speakers and haptic outputs.

We were excited to hear that Di has been speaking with the Bristol Suspension Bridge Trust about working with local artists and community members to turn the Bristol Suspension Bridge into a giant harp, involving a mixture of performance and public engagement. When Di found out that Bristol Suspension Bridge was coming up to its 150th anniversary, 2015 became a self-imposed deadline. Di will be developing this leg of her project in the Studio while she is in Bristol, and we can’t wait to see the project evolve. Keep an eye on her website for project updates, and make a note in your diaries for the Bridge’s anniversary.