Paul De Marinis’s “Rain Dance” is a public exhibit in which people interact with falling drops of water to make music – simply by using an umbrella. Diagram, explanation, and rest of assignment are in the extended entry (i.e. “after the jump”).
“Rain Dance” is an exhibit generally set up outdoors, resembling an open-sided tunnel with several streams of water falling from its ceiling. The user takes an ordinary umbrella, and walks through the tunnel with it aloft. When a stream of water hits the umbrella, the resulting vibrations produce music, with recognizable melodies and harmonies. The tenor of the experience ranges from bemusement to outright wonder – how can it do that? There’s nothing special about the umbrellas or the water itself. The resulting music seems like magic. Users will likely be drawn by the whimsy of the experience to play with the system in various ways. The user can alter the pitch of the music by raising or lowering the umbrella, and alter the timbre by rotating or tilting it. Multiple users can combine or recombine different parts of users by intercepting different streams.
How does it work? Sound information is passed electronically to a variable nozzle, which rapidly changes the speed of the water droplets’ flow. The frequency at which droplets hit the umbrella directly determines the frequency of the resulting noise, which becomes music.
Curiously, the user’s input to this system, the umbrella, is essentially also the output device, acting as a speaker for the music. All the processing, the mechanical and electronic “thought” of the interaction, is automated on literally a higher level than the user, and the resulting confluence between input and output is a major source of the piece’s magic – it is immediately apparent that the user’s physical presence is directly determining the musical output, but there is no indication as to how.
A strictly literal inversion of this piece might be a system wherein the user plays musical pitches to determine the speed of water. However, that subjectively seems rather pointless and much less fun than the original. With that in mind, for my inversion I am proposing the following variation.
This system is essentially a musical instrument, in which the user controls the frequency of falling water in order to generate a musical output. The input could be a musical keyboard, but an ordinary shower temperature knob could just as easily be repurposed to determine the instrument’s pitch and duration. In addition, the user could manually alter the water’s flow with his or her hands. The falling water hits a taut membrane to make a sound. By swiveling the faucet, perhaps the user could direct the water towards a variety of different surfaces (rubber, metal, etc.) in order to generate a variety of timbres. It might help make the piece interesting if the user’s interaction with the frequency nozzle was mediated through an arpeggiator, so that the system always results in musical-sounding durations and intervals, but the speed and key of the arpeggiation could still be manipulated to form melodies.
Though the mechanism by which this system makes music is essentially the same as the original, the intentionality and perceived interaction methodology of the piece are inverted. Instead of the frequency-switching being hidden from the user, it is brought to the forefront. Instead of interpreting a mysterious sequence of falling music, the user is in control of the music. Naïve users could find simple variations in sound amusing, and perhaps with experience users could perform legitimate musical feats. This variation on the piece loses much of the bewildering charm of the original by laying bare its mechanism, but allows the user to understand on additional levels the central draw of “Rain Dance:” that water somehow conveying music is really cool.