ii · hét szoba — seven rooms

artikulációs · articulation — the system is the instrument

Four keys, one instrument, seven rooms. The gesture vocabulary never changes — the same four notes, struck the same way, damped when you let go. What changes is where you are standing: an anechoic chamber, a tiled bathroom, a concrete stairwell, a forest at noon, a cathedral, a car interior, an open field at night. You are asked to make the same musical statement in all seven. It is an impossible instruction, and the failure is the content: a phrase that is eloquent in the stairwell is simply inaudible in the field.

The rooms are generated, not sampled. Each impulse response is built in the page from a decaying noise tail, an explicit set of early reflections in front of it, and a spectral tilt over the whole thing — flutter between the parallel hard surfaces of tile and concrete, a single far slap-back for the field, almost nothing at all for the anechoic chamber. The installed work convolves measured responses; a web page cannot carry seven of those, and a generated one teaches the lesson perfectly well.

what this strand isolates

Expression, with the criterion removed. This is the only strand where the source explicitly refuses to define success — it is born of the player’s own particular approach, and may run all the way to complete cacophony. That refusal is a serious artistic position and it should not be quietly repaired later by adding a score. There is none here. Nothing on this page can be won.

Which raises the obvious problem: if nothing counts as winning, what is being examined? The answer is that the variable of interest is the player, not the performance. Given identical hardware and identical starting conditions, what do a hundred people do? How fast do they commit to a vocabulary? Do they explore the extremes or settle in the middle? Do they play the instrument, or play with it? Those are legible, measurable and interesting, and none of them requires ranking anybody. The table above asks one of them: when the room grows, do you compensate — slower, sparser, letting the room do the work — or do you fight it, louder and denser until nothing is distinguishable? Both are common. Neither is better.

The strand is also where the project touches the accessible-instrument tradition most directly: Soundbeam in Bristol, the Skoog out of Edinburgh, Pauline Oliveros’s AUMI, the OHMI Trust’s competition for one-handed instruments. An instrument that four buttons can play expressively is, for a great many people, the only expressive instrument available. That is also why this piece is the strand’s cheapest and most portable: seven convolution kernels and four keys.

the rest of the strand

1. A1 Hangszerkészítő · Instrument Smith
   Not a game with a win state — a forge. Six force-sensitive buttons and an instrument that starts generic and unruly. A long press while it is sounding hardens whatever it is currently doing into a permanent property: this scale degree, that attack, this resonance, that decay. Over twenty minutes the player converts a stranger’s instrument into their own. It is then saved, named by its maker, and can be played again, exchanged, or handed to the next visitor. Exhibited, it becomes a wall of instruments made by strangers, each playable by whoever comes next — the strongest single argument this project has for a gallery. measures — time-to-first-commitment · ratio of hardened to fluid parameters · population diversity from identical initial conditions · re-play rate of inherited instruments
2. A2 Zajjog · Right to Noise
   Two to five players in one room, on loudspeakers rather than headphones. A group improvisation whose only rule is a slowly moving permission envelope: at any moment the system indicates, by thickening or thinning its own bed, how much density it will tolerate. Exceed it and nothing stops you — the system starts listening back, sampling the excess and returning it out of phase some seconds later. Cacophony is never punished, only remembered and given back. The name is a coinage, zaj (noise) + jog (right), and it states the position: the right to be loud is granted unconditionally, and the consequence is memory rather than penalty. measures — group density over time · turn-taking structure and leadership · convergence vs divergence · individual response to hearing one’s own excess returned

Neither is built here. A1 needs force-sensing under every key and somewhere for a made instrument to live afterwards; A2 needs a room, loudspeakers and four other people, all of which a browser tab is poorly placed to supply.