Materials: polycarbonate plastic, steel, music wire, felt, lights, infrared filters, and electric circuits. Size: center music producing unit is eight feet tall including the light fixture. Each of the five infrared emitting units that help sense the movement of people in the room is four feet tall and twenty inches at the base. These are placed about the walls of a moderately sized room. Pentatonic Orrery is an interactive installation that creates self-organized music through the tension between a circuit that drives the five notes eventually to play in phase and the movement of people in the room that drives the notes to play out of phase. In this way, everyone who moves around the piece has an effect on it and is really part of the work. The clockwork Orreries of previous centuries made visible the movements of the planets about the sun. This one explores another kind of harmony. The musical tones are produced in much the same way a piano does. A felt hammer strikes a wire that is held in tension in a steel harp. The clear plastic sound box sustains the harmonic interactions of the tones. The strings are tuned in a pentatonic scale corresponding to the black keys on a piano; A#, C#, D#, F#, G#. If people stop moving around in the room, the notes will bunch together in their rhythm. When this happens, there is a circuit that senses that all the beats are in phase and this circuit prevents the notes from sounding until movement is sensed in the room. Then the tones will begin to sound again.
"Pentatonic Orrery"
Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery presents
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Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery presents 
