Super Collider is a new work by Christine Southworth for the Kronos Quartet and Gamelan Elek Trika, a brand new electronic "virtual gamelan" being designed and developed by Alex Rigopulos (founder and CEO of Harmonix Music, inventors of video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band). The piece is inspired by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN - the largest machine ever built, that's purpose is to change science forever, recreating the beginning of the universe in a tube and proving (or disproving) the theories of particle physics of the last half-century.
Gamelan Elek Trika will be performed by 15 musicians from Gamelan Galak Tika, a Balinese gamelan based at MIT and directed by Evan Ziporyn, as well as by Kronos Quartet. The instruments will be played like a gamelan, with interlocking patterns and all of the intricacies that make gamelan music, with the tunings and timbres changing by turning knobs (into any sounds, including the Kronos Quartet!) This set of instruments will be the first ever collective midi instrument (requiring a group of players rather than a single musician).
Gamelan Elek Trika instruments produced by Alex Rigopulos; sensors, electronics, and interface design by Andrew Boch, Matt Boch, and Laurel Pardue; technical assembly by Stéphanie Bouchard; frame design and assembly by Quentin Kelly.
More about Super Collider
"Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable. To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe you have to build the biggest machine in the world. To recreate the first millionths of a second of creation you have to focus energy on an awesome scale." - The Guardian
Super Collider will explore two obverse sound worlds and traditions, the vast culture of the string quartet juxtaposed with the ancient performance methods of a gamelan, unleashed through the unlimited sonic universe of electronics. In our own test-tube experiment, this musical moment of collision will hopefully achieve similarly unparalleled results.
What does particle physics have to do with music and art? String theory, which the CERN facility hopes to verify or disprove, presumes that matter itself is the manifestation of resonant vibrations, that the world itself is a universal harmony. This post-modern notion - which Kronos embodies with every performance - itself resonates with the ancient Hindu notion of om, the absolute manifest, which is the basis of Indonesian gamelan. We will bring these two ideas of resonance together by combining Kronos with a gamelan - even a virtual one.
The behavior of subatomic particles is probabilistic, group-oriented: the motion of any one particle is unpredictable and unknowable: it's what the group does that counts. This could also be a description of the Balinese gamelan, where individual virtuosity is subsumed to interlocking patterns, composite melodies, the sound of the whole. This is also the spirit of Kronos.
When Robert Moog developed his synthesizer in the 1960s, he modeled its functionality on the piano and on western music in general - a single person, sitting at a keyboard. This is one reason why it was popularized by Wendy Carlos' Swtiched On Bach. Gamelan Elek Trika takes a similar approach to the very distinctive musical practices of Indonesia. Like the great gamelans of Bali and Java, Gamelan Elek Trika works as a single unit, played by a complete ensemble. The instruments are played like a gamelan - metallophones, drums, and gongs, playing interlocking patterns - but all are channeled through a central 'brain', a single processing unit which controls their sound, tuning, and timbre. The composer can thus alter the sonic environment globally, not just for one instrument at a time but for the complete ensemble.