This summer, I was introduced to the hydraulophone, a fountain that makes music, or instrument that sprays water, depending on how you look at it. With frost nipping at the flora in these parts, it may be hard to contemplate making splashy music, but the hydraulophone is having a moment in the public spotlight.
Torontonian Steve Mann's invention has been nominated for a People's Design Award sponsored by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, a New York City branch of the massive Smithsonian system.
Votes are being collected until Oct. 20. The winner will be announced on the 22nd. To coincide with National Design Week, the museum is offering free admission Oct. 18 to 24. The building, which is easy to walk past because it looks like an embassy, sits a half-dozen blocks north of the Metropolitan Museum, at the corner of 5th Ave. and 91st St.
As far as I can tell, the hydraulophone is the only instrument on the list of nominees, but there's plenty of cool stuff (and pretty cheesy stuff) to see on the list.
Here's an article I wrote in the Star on Mann and the hydraulophone in August, to give you a bit more background:
The technology may be
different, but the creative impulse is the same.
More than 500 years
after Leonardo da Vinci sketched out a belt-driven stringed instrument called
viola organista, one of the world's out-there thinkers is pushing the hydraulophone,
which makes music from pressurized water.
While Leonardo's idea
didn't go anywhere, this new creation may turn out to have a practical future.
Cyberworld pioneer Steve
Mann, guru of all things virtual, is no less engaged in the ancient - and very
real - elements of earth, wind, water and fire.
Mann lumps the
instruments we commonly use - strings, percussion, brass and woodwind - into
the first two categories. And he realized about 20 years ago that there was no
need to neglect water in the harnessing of sound waves for listening pleasure.
He explains this at his workshop-cum-home across the street from the Art
Gallery of Ontario. You may have walked by the odd-looking grey building, which
sports rusting pipes and something that looks like a pink plastic worm crawling
up the facade.
If you ever wanted an
ideal, real-life example of a nutty professor's lair, just step inside. The
jumble of electronics, plastics, pipes, papers and unidentifiable clutter
extends from the front door up to a fourth-floor terrace overlooking Frank
Gehry's undulating-glass AGO canopy. On the terrace, Mann begins to fill the
pan under a blue version of the plastic worm with water from a garden hose.
"This is Nessie,
" says Mann introducing this two-metre-long object, with a slit of a
smiling mouth and 12 small holes running along its top. It's the smallest of
his diverse family of hydraulophones.
Mann pressurizes
Nessie's water by activating a battery-powered pump inside her head. Soon,
water begins to spout from the holes on her back.
She looks like an
overgrown lawn sprinkler - except you can't play most irrigation devices.
Mann strips down to his
shorts and places his hands over the jets. In moments, his fingers are tracing
out the Yankee Civil War song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home, "
complete with elementary harmonies.
I step in and try making
some music with the 12 notes, which begin on A, and don't include any flats or
sharps. The tone changes as I vary the angle and amount of pressure on the
water jets.
I see why Mann took off
most of his clothes: Anything within spraying range is wet.
"It's part of the
fun of this instrument, " Mann says, smiling.
Nessie sounds something
like a harmonium or a digital organ. It makes sense if you think of the moans
given off by old water pipes.
"I think that the
flute makes the best analogy, " Mann explains.
Where the flute has a
single column of air that is modified, note by note, as the player moves
fingers across the holes, Nessie uses a separate water pipe for each tone.
When the player puts a
finger on one of the water jets, it changes the physics of where and how the
water is travelling. Where there's turbulence, there can be sound.
How Mann has translated
swirling into sound is not something he's willing to divulge. He says that, as
he is gets more patents for his aquatic inventions, "people are eventually
going to figure it out."
Mann has been working on
a wide variety of hydraulophones - some use reeds; an early version uses
conical pipes like a church organ's. Some serve as outdoor fountains when not
being played. Others are purpose-built for eager fingers.
Although other, older
instruments use water in some form - such as Benjamin Franklin's water organ or
glasses filled with different amounts of liquid - Mann says the hydraulophone is
the first in which the medium itself is the source of sound.
Mann says the ancient
Romans or Greeks would probably have come up with something similar a couple of
millennia ago, but they didn't pressurize their water supply.
"They had
aqueducts, not pipes, " and so they wouldn't have chanced upon the
resulting harmonics.
For a man so closely
associated with information technology and virtual worlds, Mann is unexpectedly
passionate about the tactile beauty of the liquid form.
"Water adds a
flowing, emotional element, " to music that is missing in strings and
percussion, he says. For him, this is a primal need.
During a
weather-challenged Toronto summer, it may be easy to overlook how a hydraulophone
offers a way to combine outdoor playtime with music.
A piano won't be much
fun in the backyard on a 30 C day, but Nessie certainly would.
Mann created a
large-scale hydraulophone at the Ontario Science Centre that is left on 24
hours a day during the summer, attracting substantial crowds in nice weather.
"I know a guy who
goes there at 4 a.m. so that he can get a chance to play on it, " he says.
The new instrument is a
natural fit in outdoor spaces. Just don't expect the water-spewing gadget to
become a fixture in your local concert hall anytime soon.
Here's someone playing Mann's large-scale hydraulophone at the Ontario Science Centre:
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