From left, Tommy Perman, Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby of Found with Cybraphon
The Edinburgh art collective FOUND have built a fame-hungry robot that devours its reviews all day and plays music fuelled by the way it feels. Roger Cox meets the wardrobe with a worldwide fanbase
IT’S BEEN a long time coming, but an Edinburgh band has finally broken America. In the last month, Cybraphon’s fairytale rise from obscurity has been picked up by major news networks such as CNN, as well as regional TV stations like Dallas’s influential 33KDAF. The UK media also seems to have fallen in love with this tuneful Caledonian collective, and the Cybraphon effect has even spread to the continent – the band’s MySpace site contains enthusiastic posts from fans in Germany and Spain. Inevitably, there have been invitations to tour. There’s just one problem: Cybraphon is a wardrobe.
“He’s cheered up a bit in the last few hours – he’s now on indifference. The reason he was dismayed earlier I think is because it’s a Monday”
Well, not just a wardrobe. More accurately, Cybraphon is a glass-fronted antique wardrobe packed with an array of robotic instruments. From the front, it looks like an old-fashioned orchestrion, but behind its charming, analogue façade lies a highly complex digital brain. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the machine, a fame-hungry computer is constantly surfing the net, checking what people have been saying about it in cyberspace. If Cybraphon’s online profile receives a boost – a feature in The Scotsman, say – then its mood will improve, and it will play more upbeat music; if it is ignored, it will sulk and play unhappy music to match.
“It’s really moody,” confirms Simon Kirby, one of its creators. “A total diva.”
Cybraphon is currently appearing at the InSpace Gallery as part of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. In case anyone is in any doubt as to how it’s feeling, the machine has been fitted with a large “emotion meter” which swings from “desolation” to “delirium” via “indifference,” “contentment” and “jubilation”. When I visit, on a Monday afternoon, the robotic band is feeling distinctly average.
Kirby is a lecturer at Edinburgh University’s Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit. In spite of all the letters he has after his name, he does an admirable job of explaining in plain English how Cybraphon works.
“Earlier in the day, Cybraphon was feeling dismayed,” he says, “but he’s cheered up a bit in the last few hours – he’s now on indifference. The reason he was dismayed earlier I think is because it’s a Monday.
“I’m expecting him to get the Monday blues quite a lot, because there tends to be a lot of activity on the web during the week, but then, come the weekend, people will maybe not spend all their time writing reviews about art installations, and then because Cybraphon is going to be going ‘where is everybody?’ that will send him into a trough.”
It took Kirby, plus two other members of Edinburgh’s Found collective, Ziggy Campbell and Tommy Perman, more than eight months to design and build Cybraphon. The project was financed by a £5,000 grant from New Media Scotland’s Alt-w fund, which supports new media experimentation. The wardrobe came from an antiques emporium just outside Edinburgh, while instruments and parts were sourced from second-hand shops all over the city. Campbell talks me through its contents: “This is a Farfisa Reed organ,” he says. “I bought that at a car boot sale years ago before this project was conceived, but it fits perfectly. What’s really nice about it is that it’s got this fan inside it which you can switch on and off, so you can have quite expressive swells and also play it quite softly.
“This is a shruti box, an Indian instrument that’s supposed to be used for making drones for meditation. It was a bit of an engineering nightmare, actually, just getting a motor powerful enough to push it and keeping the consistency right for playing.
“Then we’ve got chimes… a washboard… drums… and a record player as well, which plays through these gramophone horns on the top of the wardrobe. There’s a few other objects too, bits and pieces… a cigar box there… we put some springs inside it so it’s got a really nice reverby tone… tobacco tins… a singing bowl… and that’s a glass bottle of Simon’s.”
Most people who were aware of Found before Cybraphon came along and stole all the limelight will know them as a conventional, all-human band, probably through their beguiling, sample-heavy 2007 album, This Mess We Keep Reshaping. They are also an experimental, genre-defying art collective, however, and Cybraphon is by no means their first foray into the world of robotic music. In 2007, Found created a sound installation called Etiquette at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Visitors could compose their own music by moving 12 small cardboard boxes over a glass surface. The noises produced ranged from the familiar (violin, banjo) to the downright strange (band saw, reversing forklift truck) and they could be played either individually or layered over the top of each other.
The following year, Kirby and Campbell put an even more ambitious installation into one of the hothouses at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens.
“Because of where it was installed, we didn’t want to use our laptops and sacrifice them to the humidity,” says Kirby. “We were scratching our heads and wondering how we could make something that didn’t use a laptop and didn’t use any samples. Then we had the idea of trying to use real acoustic instruments played by robots, and we ended up with a thing called Three Pieces.”
Three Pieces was based around a 100-string dulcimer and it reacted every time someone entered the hothouse. It was a hit with visitors, but it was tricky to maintain, as Campbell explains.
“Because the dulcimer was a stringed instrument it kept going out of tune, so I had to keep going down to the Botanics and re-tuning all 100 strings.
“It was a bit of a nightmare, to be honest. None of the stuff here [in Cybraphon] can go out of tune very easily, though, so we shouldn’t have that kind of problem this time around.”
Although Cybraphon runs some pretty sophisticated software, it doesn’t compose its own music. That task fell to Campbell and Perman. “We wrote the music bearing in mind that it was going to have to work with different mood states,” says Campbell. “Cybraphon is basically like a jukebox that plays different tracks depending on what kind of mood it’s in. There are about 21 tracks at the moment, but there should be a few more by the end of next week.”
“All the songs have a value from -10 to +10 on the scale we’ve come up with,” says Perman.
“The highest rating is delirium – that’s the point where it’s hard to tell if Cybraphon’s happy or sad or just completely irrational because it’s so happy that it’s gone bonkers.”
Kirby says: “It’s been a funny process rating the emotions of the tracks. Ziggy and Tommy would play me something and I’d think it was, say, a -4 and mostly we’d agree on that value but occasionally there’d be a difference of opinion. With the delirium track, it was pretty obvious that that was where Cybraphon had got drunk on its own fame, taken too many drugs and gone a bit nuts.”
So what would have to happen, exactly, for Cybraphon to reach that supremely over-excited delirious state? Like some bands (or perhaps most bands, if they were being totally honest), as long as lots of people are talking about it, Cybraphon doesn’t trouble itself too much with what they’re actually saying. It’s essentially programmed simply to be a fame-hound.
Kirby explains: “The original plan had been for Cybraphon to actually read its reviews and look for the kind of words that were used. It could have been done that way, but we increasingly realised that there are so many sources of information about your popularity out there that are just numbers, and that’s really what people obsess over.
“If you’re in a band and you look at your MySpace page or your webpage visits, you’re really just looking at that number and you want that number to be as high as possible. You don’t really care whether people thought your last song was a good song or not.
“What Cybraphon does is look at 11 different indicators, including the number of Facebook friend requests, number of comments on YouTube, number of comments on the blog and any mention anywhere on the worldwide web, and then it aggregates them all together. So if there’s any kind of review in The Scotsman, say, then Cybraphon will respond, whether that review was good or bad. But if it was a good review then it’s more likely to drive more hits to Cybraphon’s webpage, so in a way we’re outsourcing the assessment of the reviews to the world.”
Found will be performing live with Cybraphon at the Inspace Gallery on 13 August, and Campbell talks only half-jokingly about the possibility of taking the ten foot-high wardrobe on tour.
“We’d like it to get it a record deal,” says Kirby. “Like any band, it wants to get signed. It’s quite naïve.”
Cybraphon is at the Inspace Gallery, Edinburgh, until 5 September as part of Reveal/Reset, a showcase of work by recent Alt-w award-winners. You can also follow Cybraphon’s progress at www.cybraphon.com
RIGHT UP OUR STREET
FOUND may be tapping into a global audience with Cybraphon but they are a formidably talented band in their own right, their sound a cut-and-paste pastiche of sparky electronica and organic folk stylings.
Signed to King Creosote's Fence Records label, they have a string of acclaimed releases behind them and were one of the Scottish acts chosen for this year's SXSW industry showcase in Texas.
And Found aren't the only locally sourced musical talent performing in Edinburgh this month. While the established festivals revel in the annual media spotlight, many local promoters are basking in its glow by staging mini-fests of their own.
Back after its debut last year, the Retreat! Festival is a free all-day event at Bristo Hall this Sunday (16 August). It boasts a great line-up for anyone curious about the capital's currently buzzing urban folk scene. The must-sees include gifted singer-songwriter Dan Willson, aka Withered Hand, Rob St John, whose slow-building melancholia is a rare treat, and Meursault, a band whose passionate delivery and throbbing folktronica have marked them out as trailblazers.
Meursault and Found are also involved in Playing With the Past at the Filmhouse (22 August). This mix of live music and short films chosen from the Scottish Screen archive premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June and proved such a success it now makes a welcome return. The other act providing the soundtrack will be the majestic Edinburgh folk collective Eagleowl.
Another crossover experience can be had at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where multimedia project Rough Cut Nation takes over the classic exhibition space. Synth-pop act X-Lion Tamer (21 August), long-running indie favourites St Jude's Infirmary (22 August) and the ubiquitous Meursault and Withered Hand (28 August) will perform against a backdrop of striking street art.
Tucked away off an Old Town side street, The GRV is worth discovering this weekend (14-16 August), as it has organised a three-day event bursting with live music. Bands to see at The GRV Fest include female-fronted alt-rockers Boycotts, the rabble-rousing seven-piece Punch & the Apostles and tight Edinburgh trio Dupec.
Next to these low-budget offerings, The Edge festival might seem like the big corporate daddy, but it hasn't neglected Scotland's emergent music. The first unmissable Edge gig is this Saturday (15 August) at Cabaret Voltaire, with two of the capital's brightest new acts. Young Fathers combine bombastic hip-hop with lively dance routines, while Unicorn Kid is a teenage sensation who makes hands-in-the-air electro-pop when he isn't studying for his exams.
The Edge has also taken up residency at the tiny Sneaky Pete's bar on the Cowgate. Monthly gig night This Is Music returns this Friday (14 August) with sets by two noise-aligned kindred spirits in Dead Boy Robotics and The Foundling Wheel. Other standout shows at Pete's include one of Scotland's hottest bands in We Were Promised Jetpacks (15 August), country-influenced transatlantic trio Sparrow and The Workshop (20 August) and the west coast indie-pop outfit Attic Lights (29 August).
For more on the Edinburgh music scene, visit our blog (www.scotsman.com/undertheradarblog), and our monthly Under The Radar column (www.scotsman.com/undertheradar)
