Air on the G String: meteo-musical harp comes to Moscow

28 June, 2009, 19:39

Canadian Nicolas Reeves has created a fascinating meteo-musical installation that reads the real-time movement of clouds, including their height and density, translating it into intriguing musical sequences.

The sounds of this extraordinary self-playing “instrument” can be heard in Moscow beginning from July 3 through to October 20.

Nicolas Reeves is no ordinary man – he’s an artist, an architect and a physicist rolled into one person. His “Cloud Harp” installation is the transformation of a natural phenomenon into music. “A meteo-electronic installation, a result of scientific work in radio-electronics, acoustics and programming,” is how the Cloud Harp is described by its creator.

Reeves’s Cloud Harp cannot be compared to anything else anywhere in the world. It is one of a kind. Equipped with knowledge of science and technology, Nicolas Reeves constructed the electronic device which is able to scan cloudscapes and transform their digital prints into sounds, and starts transmitting the music of the sky itself.

Nicolas Reeves

Nicolas Reeves is the scientific director of Le Centre Interuniversitaire en Arts Mediatiques (Interuniversity Centre of Media Arts), in Montreal.

He also heads the design and architecture laboratory NXI GESTATIO at the University of Quebec (Montreal, Canada).

Nicolas Reeve’s works were widely exhibited in many museums, festivals and art forums across the world.

“A physical sculpture containing a technological system that, by means of an infrared laser beam eight kilometers high, reads the structure of clouds and then transforms this reading into musical sequences.” The clouds’ density, amounts of ice, light exposure, ability to reflect solar beams, temperature, height, speed and other physical parameters are immediately transferred to the machine which uses a specifically composed program to give out sounds.

The project is brought to Moscow by “Laboratoria Art&Science Space” – the first Russian noncommercial research centre which focuses on the interaction between modern art and science. The unique object will be on display in Moscow until October 20.