tube Gets Uplifted

Taking the concept of ‘lift music’ literally to new levels of excellence and context, audio specialists tube uk designed an ingenious solution for an interactive sound installation by UK composer Anna Meredith, part of Manchester International Festival 2017’s “Music for a Busy City”, taking six leading composers out of the concert hall and commissioning each to create a new 10 minute piece.

The idea was to bring music to different spaces through which people pass every day and they were all carefully designed by tube’s Project Manager, Adam Taylor.

Anna’s totally ‘live’ and unique art took advantage of four lifts and a concourse linking two high profile city centre retail spaces – Selfridges and Marks & Spencer.

“This was one that really stood out as different and interesting,” enthused tube uk’s Melvyn Coote, “both for the challenges of accessing the unusual location and the lateral thinking involved in finding a solution to mix the music live.

The two Selfridges shafts are over 22 metres tall and the installation associated with this side of the concourse involved 4 pairs of Tannoy V8 speakers which were positioned equidistantly on the back-side of the exposed lift shafts, starting at the top - 22 metres high – and graduating down the shaft, with a pair at each floor level below.

The Marks and Spencer lifts are three stories high and on the opposite wall of the concourse, so three sets of speakers were attached to these, again starting at the top with a pair corresponding to each floor.

The lifts each had its own ‘vocal range’ – soprano, alto, tenor and bass – and the height of each lift at each floor determined the pitch, with lower tones on ground floors and below and higher tones as the lift levels increase.

Access to rig the speakers involved sourcing a “Spider” MEWP (mobile elevated working platform), with caterpillar tracks – to avoid damaging the floors - and folding feet so it would fit through the double doors at the end of the passageway. It also needed to have enough reach to access the highest rigging points.

For the artwork, Anna Meredith created 14 tones of music each related to a specific floor and lift position. A QLab control system is programmed so different tones are triggered when the lifts reaches different floors - based on the four vocal ranges.

She also made 20 transitional pieces of music which play when the lifts are in transit between the floors, depending on whether they are going up or down and which floors they are moving between … resulting in a complex and beautiful series of sounds.

The very clever bit was getting the music – stored in QLab – to play out as the lifts moved up and down, randomly activated by members of the public, completely unaware that they were creating live art as they browsed around the stores.

Melvyn and Adam enlisted another member for the tube team, engineer and programmer Dan Steele and collectively chose programming platform Max to realise the concept. Max is a flexible and dynamic visual programming language for music and multimedia developed by Cycling 74.

tube worked with the two different lift service companies who both came on-board with the project and provided contact closure interfaces to allow the positional lift data to be accessed. This was converted into a MIDI stream which MAX was able to use and manipulate. MAX then sent MIDI message along to QLab to trigger the correct samples at the right times.

It took five intense days of R ‘n’ D and programming to get all the control systems communicating with one another.

The physical installation was further galvanised by elements like cable runs which had to be run up the lift shafts and through the lift motor rooms on the roof of the store and a 50 metre data and signal loom which had to be installed between the two lift motor rooms. The roof work took a day and a half and getting the 14 speakers positioned and rigged took 10 hours overnight.

Once that was all complete, Melvyn and Anna spent time completing the acoustic set up and programming – the lift / sound alignment was done via walkie-talkie between the concourse and the roof and this process alone took around 5 hours.

The results were amazing! An exclusive interactive music ‘show’ took place for 10 minutes every hour – each one individual and different from the last. For the other 50 minutes, Anna created an alternative simplified soundscape which used only 14 lift / floor sounds and no transitional elements.

tube work on many interesting arts projects, “but this was one of the most stunning, resulting in an incredible organic music composition that presented us with all the technical brain-teasers we love!” summed up Melvyn.

The installation was part of the Manchester International Festival 2017 programme and was produced by Tom Higham.

The tube team consisted of Melvyn Coote (Project Lead), Adam Taylor (Project Manager) and Dan Steele (MAX & QLab Programmer)

Other “Music  for  a  Busy  City” works were created by Mohammed  Fairouz,  Matthew Herbert, Huang  Ruo,  Olga  Neuwirth and Philip Venables. Together with Anna Meredith’s composition featured here, they created  six  totally new  pieces  of  music  in response to specific spots around Manchester, from shopping centres, streets and train stations to the Town Hall and St Anne’s Square.