“if and when spiders organise orchestras of their own accord, what would their music be like?”

of all the fascinating things that is on at gillman barracks right now this is the one i’ve got to try to see: tomas saraceno and the arachnid orchestra.

bruce quek reviewing it for ‘today online’ describes:

“A number of these structures are, in a manner suggestive of an experiment in progress, probed and penetrated by a variety of instruments, which sound almost as exotic as they look — contact microphones and a laser-Doppler vibrometer. These translate subtle movements in the webs into sound — stringed instruments, basically, built and played by spiders — resulting in the gallery being awash in strangely alien aural textures. Continuing the orchestral theme is an Aeolian wind harp, a wind instrument in which the wafting of long strands of spider-silk is similarly sonified. There is a curious sense of fine-grained participation and immersion when one realises that actions as simple as walking past these instruments, or just breathing, disturbs the air around them, integrating human movement and existence into their sonic tapestry.”

“The percussion section is staffed by a number of spiders — the golden-furred heteropoda davidbowie among them — in small, miked-up enclosures, translating their movements into percussive sound. […]This percussive theme continues with a short video, which emphasises the fact that this percussion is not merely incidental — spiders may deliberately “drum” to communicate with their kind, with their webs functioning as a prosthetic sensory network.”