Music in the Garden
Flower show visitors played Tod Machover's hyperinstruments
By Sally Atwood

A sea of flowers in Minneapolis in the middle of March is a powerful inducement to hop into the car and brave the winter cold. This year residents had another incentive for visiting the annual Marshall Field's and Bachman's Spring Flower Show--the chance to make music on Tod Machover's electronic "hyperinstruments."

Machover, a composer and professor at the Media Lab, teamed up with landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy, MCP '78, MAR '78, to bring the south of France alive with flowers and music. Messervy designed a warehouse-size garden whose re-creation of a Mediterranean seaside scene attracted more than 96,000 visitors. Machover created three interactive music stations that allowed visitors of all ages to experiment with his hyperinstruments, which are able to produce both synthetic and acoustic tones.

Visitors walking through the garden first encountered four pianos programmed to play music by Debussy, Satie, or Stravinsky. Each piano was connected to electronic touch pads. By moving their fingers around the pads, visitors could instantly change the music the pianos played, activating variations composed by Machover.

At another station were brightly colored, embroidered balls called Shapers, which emitted music that changed depending on how hard and how long the visitors squeezed them. The final station paired five paper pinwheels with wind chimes. The chimes were suspended from pine trees, and the only way to play them was to blow on the pinwheels. The pinwheels were so sensitive that even a toddler's breath could create music.

The flower show marked the first time that this generation of Machover's instruments had been made available to people outside of guided workshops. The wind chimes were especially popular with children, but Machover himself was particularly pleased with the pianos. "It was very compelling to hear the final results on an acoustic piano, not through a computer," he says.