Tuesday's Toy Symphony concert at the NCH was the fruit of collaboration between MIT Media Lab, the Ark cultural centre for children, the Centre for Research in IT in Education at TCD, and RTÉ's National Symphony Orchestra. The actual concert may be the most public face of the project, but it's only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The most important component is the experience to which the participating children were exposed along the way, and the developments in their relationship to music which resulted.
There must be an understandable temptation to view the musical toys dreamt up by the folks at MIT Media Lab - things like Beat Bugs (percussive tools with bendable antenna controllers) and Sound Shapers (things to squeeze, with sensors built in to the fabric) - as heavy-duty educational tools or even wannabe musical instruments. It may well be that's exactly what they are. During Tuesday's concert, they came across as fun things to play with. I'm sure more conventional means could have been used to control all the nature evocations of the sound shapers in Jean-Pascal Beintus's Nature Suite. But, hey, you could eat your soup with a square spoon, too, and who'd want to do that with a more user-friendly and graspable design available.
The operational overheads of the new toys currently seem very high. Leaving aside the time it took to wire up the stage and manhandle the heavier equipment, it also took a bank of computers with their own crew to get the toys and technology to work at all, and even then not everything went as planned. On the other hand, the fun seemed very real.
What was on display in Tuesday's concert was very much the sort of fun people aimed at in piano duet pieces with teacher and pupil parts, except that the packaging here is thoroughly up-to-the-minute. Even hyperscore, the composing at a computer for novices idea, is not new. Xenakis's UPIC provided that in the 1970s, and probably mostly avoided the restriction to (or translation into) triadic harmony that the pieces heard on Tuesday involved.
The young audience at the NCH created quite a buzz, and I certainly got the impression that most of them would rather have been playing with the toys on stage instead of just listening to them. Most of the adult composers involved kept their sights well within the walls of the nursery, as it were. Tod Machover, the man behind the whole venture, dared rather further afield, opening up some slightly uncomfortable gaps between music, technology and the listeners. A new toy, after all, like an old musical instrument, is only of interest for what you can make out of it.
Violin virtuoso Joshua Bell and the members of the NSO under Gerhard Markson were patient exponents of all that was asked of them. The hyperviolin - with all its paraphernalia of microsensors and morphing - seemed like one of those properties estate agents describe as having "great potential". The possibilities are self-evident, but nothing's in a state you'd even think about living with yet.
