META-TIME

2018.12 | Individual Work

New Interface for Musical Expression | Live Performance | Physical Instrument | Installation

Exhibition

Showed in New Interface for Musical Expression 2018, The Paper Box.

Exhibited in ITP Winter Show 2018.

Meta-Time is a novel music instrument and also a live performance that reflect human daily struggles with time. It also explores body movement interactions and how the tension, that from body gestures, interacts with audio and sound.

The performance took place at The Paper Box in Brooklyn, New York, on 12/09/2018.

Time is fascinating. The human made it, but also have struggled with it. The human may think they are controlling time. However, they are just labors of time, even slaves of time. That’s why I choose the metal chain, the clock and hand wheels to make a machine, a ruthless character, and me, as the performer, try to show the struggle between human and time, human and machine.

Toolkit

Software:

C
Arduino
Max/Msp
Ableton live

Hardware:

Custom two-hand clock mechanism
Custom magnet encoder
Encoder module
Arduino Nano
Stepper motor
Handwheels
Metal chain
CNC modeled plywood
Laser-cut modeled foam board

Credits

Solo work.

Ideation, programming, physical computing, installation design, interaction design, music composition, fabrication and performance design are all finished by Chengchao Zhu

Ideation

Once people think of time, people think of clocks; once people think of clocks, the clicking sound appears. I love hearing clicking sound; different clocks have different clicking sound, sometimes this sound makes me calm and sometimes it makes me anxious. This series of imaginations are intriguing to me. So that's where I begin thinking about making an instrument about time, about the clock.

Then when I think more in-depth about time, it's more interesting to me. People created time, as a measurement, it is absolute, nothing going to change it. However, people always have struggled with time. Most of the time, people hope time pass by slowly, occasionally people wish it can be faster. People want to stretch or compress time somehow even though they know time is ruthless and won't change for any reason.

After that, I conceive this performance with two characters on the stage. The clock, represent the meticulous machine, ruthless time and me, represent human who tends to affect the machine, change the time. And the music would be based on clicking sound, gear running sound and other mechanism sounds. With my movement, music may be stretched or compressed to indicate the change of time.

Process

1. Mockup

It didn't take much time for me to decided that the metal chain is one of the major elements that I will interact with because it's heavy, it's solid, it's often used in giant machine and it's also dramatic on the stage, it's a perfect fit for my project and it will help me convey my idea.

Then I did a mockup of me performing with a chain, to see if it is effective as I imagine in audience's view.

2.System Design

Start with metal chains, I developed several versions of my instrument, and I chose other same industrial style elements such as hand wheels, gears, mainsprings. During this process, I met some challenges.

Challenges I met in this step:

Because I decided to use the metal chain, and weight that is heavy enough to pull the chain back, the whole system needs to be super robust. How to build a structure that could support all weight that I added to the system is a big challenge for me.
Ideally, the instrument should be 8-9 feet high, so that it would give a better sense of ruthlessness to the audience. However, the higher the instrument is, the less stable it is. How to balance the height and the stableness of the system is also a challenge.
Time is my biggest challenge because I need to design the system, finish the functionality of the instrument, compose music, fabricate, and create the performance in just seven weeks.

Those challenges force me to think quickly, prototype quickly, test out and find something is not going to work, try alternatives quickly, iterate quickly. Then I finalize the system:

3.Prototype

Functionally, I need to get real-time data from hand wheels, chains, and also I need to be able to control two hands of the clock separately.

Making a clock that two hands of it could be controlled separately by stepper motors is not easy. I did a lot of researches and found that the mechanism is the most challenging part. Fortunately, I read the documentation of Ben Light about making a customized clock, that saved my life. Then I used Max/Msp to get the volume of a sound and feed that data back to the clock and finished prototyping the clock part.

Get data from the chain is also challenging. I tried different sensors, but none of them are stable enough for me to get data in different environments. I ended up making a customized magnet encoder to sense the chain movement. I stuck several small magnets onto chain wheels and used two hall effects sensors to detect the direction of the chain wheel rotating, and the speed of it turns. It was tested stable enough to work in any environment situation.

As to the hand wheels, I tried different motors to drive them, but still, it's hard to drive a relatively heavy hand wheel just by a stepper motor, and besides that, I also need to know how the hand wheel rotates, including direction and speed.