Piotr Sych: So many people, I can't even count how many, have repeatedly told me that I am the Leonardo Da Vinci of the 21st century.
Article was first published on Pup Zemli. Read Ukrainian version.
Before I have left Poland, I played the violin and the piano, I only finished high school music, but it gave me a good musical training when I moved from Poland to Australia (it was such a long way through Greece), at first I worked, but very briefly in factories to earn a living and later completed a two and a half year piano building and restoration course, which I lived on, and later completed courses in two areas - electronic engineering and IT. Then he worked in various places as a technologist and programmer. For some time he worked in a photo firm, when digital photography was just beginning to emerge. We were the first company that wrote programming for Kodak and Milek scanners and printers. The work was very interesting, besides, I worked for a long time with industrial machines that produced parts, we wrote programming for them.
Have you ever been to Lviv, Ukraine?
To be honest, no. I was there once when I was a young guy, but I remember almost nothing from that trip. I was passing through, at the end of the summer in 1969. I was with my parents on vacation in Yugoslavia, then there was still Yugoslavia, and the revolution in Czechoslovakia had just started and we were returning through Ukraine, but since I don't remember anything from that trip, I can honestly say that I'm here for the first time (laughs) ).
What are your musical interests?
I sometimes like to play the piano for myself, I don't think I play very well. As for music, I love absolutely everything from classical to jazz, I am actually fascinated by that improvisation, or the creation of live sounds. I love jazz classics from the oldest jazz to the newest. I am interested in those sound structures. I never thought about it since school, only a few years ago I noticed that I have such an interesting property called synesthesia. I just see the sound. Whether it's the sounds of the speakers at home or some sounds from the street, I just see it, I can't draw them, but some such spots are colored. Back in school, I could without looking at the teacher's hands repeat what she played and she was poor with me, I was young, stupid and just made fun of her, I never thought that I have a good ear, I just can to hear and remember that sound somehow so virtually. The teacher kept telling me to stop peeking, and finally when she pressed two sounds, one on the upper octave and the other on the lower one, I saw so quickly in my head that I answered her that I saw that you were playing and of course immediately left the class. I always thought it was normal that when you hear a sound you can immediately see it, but it turns out that not many people can do that. On the other hand, there is no practical application, sometimes I even feel worse because of it.
How did you get interested in musical instruments?
Where did my musical interests come from? How did I put it all together? The fact is that I am so "wrong" in a certain way. In every respectable technology, I try to see its disrespectful side. Whenever I look at a device, I try to see how it can be turned into a musical instrument. And such a turning point when I got involved in the design of electronic musical instruments was the proposal of the Ministry of Culture and Education of Australia to design certain devices for people with disabilities, that was the design of electronics for wheelchairs. So by chance I got to a children's hospital, they had some very simple musical instruments there, and I suggested that I could design something for them that would play. I built a few of these very basic tools and it turned out that they were popular and it started to take off. By the way, I was building instruments for the Center for Science and Culture in Melbourne...that's how it started and eventually my "harp without strings" was born.
Tell us about your "harp".
Some call it the "imagination frame" or the "magic harp without strings", because it looks like a window and when we reach out to it, something starts to happen, for example, music plays. The principle of operation of the frame, or "harp", is quite simple, it has invisible rays in it, which are at a distance of about 5 cm from each other, and we have 16 such strings vertically, and to make it more fun, I added 16 more strings horizontally, as a result of which the strings crossed each other, which is not possible in an ordinary instrument, because the strings would muffle each other and the instrument would not be playable. In addition, each of those strings is programmable and can be assigned a sound, although it doesn't have to be a sound, it can be any function, because the frame itself is actually a midi controller that will perform functions depending on , how to program it. That echoes my answer at the presentation of my "harp" in the Dziga gallery, I don't remember the question anymore, but I remember that I answered: If there is something that we can imagine, then today we have enough technology to program it, or to build, and since I have a bit of such an "inverted" imagination, I always look at everything from the other side and I thought that it would be interesting to build such a harp with invisible strings and one of the motivations was not only to play on invisible strings, but to create sounds with with the help of movement. This is my "inverted" approach, because usually we move to music - we dance, but here we make music with movement. But the final idea was to construct a large frame, and the "harp" that I present here in the gallery is 1.20 by 1.20 in size, in addition to it, I also constructed a "harp" that is 2 meters wide and 2.5 high, it looks like this big gate, works on the same principle, only has more strings, it is bigger and heavier and can be used for multimedia shows, it was used in the Bolshoi Theater in Łódź. In the performance, which was called a meeting in two unplayed acts, such a mysterious name...it was a dance multimedia show, the essence of the performance was that dancers met on stage in that big harp and while dancing in it, they created sound. And that's why there was such a certain objection to the dance, because as I said, usually we dance to music, but here it was the other way around. This couch was also connected to an interactive visualization that was projected onto a large screen in the back of the stage.
How many such "harps" are there?
The first harp that I brought to Poland was a harp that had only 16 strings - 8 horizontally, 8 vertically. I came with her to such an international festival "Audio art", which took place in Krakow in 2008, and everyone liked her very much. Despite the fact that it was 5 degrees cold outside, we put that harp on the roof of the music academy and gave a concert there at sunset. The weather was, surprisingly, good, only there was a strong wind, but the concert was a great success. In the end, I was invited to the next festival, in which three of my harps already took part, it was the "Warsaw Autumn" festival. Here we made such an installation, which we called "Cube", that is, actually a cube, in the courtyard of the University of Music in Warsaw, we placed a large tent with three frames under it, those three frames were controlled by four computers. In this way, we made two large sound measurements, before those frames - there were 4 or 5 quadraphonic audio systems with large speakers, which we placed in the corners of the tent and under its ceiling, and all other speakers in the corners of the courtyard and on the windows and roof of the university itself. thus we got 2 three-dimensional sound spaces - one under the tent and the other in the yard. And those "harps", which were programmed independently of each other, controlled the movement of sound, which traveled from top to bottom and from the middle to the outside and in the opposite direction, so there was such a sound vortex in that interactive cube of ours. In addition, in the center between the harps, which were arranged in the shape of a triangle, we placed a projector and it projected such interactive visualizations, modern and very well matched to the music, on the screen that was stretched under the ceiling of the tent.
Do you have all those "harps"?
I sold two of them to Australia, I have a very good friend in Poland, the composer Krzysztof Knittel - he bought one "harp" from me and has already toured almost all of Europe with it. As far as I know, he was with her in Ukraine and in Russia and in Belarus, in Austria, in Belgium... He tours quite successfully. To his credit, he is a composer, I don't know if it will be said correctly, of such modern electronic music and he wrote many works specifically for that "harp", developed his own movements for it. By the way, it was his music that we used in the performance I mentioned earlier, because in addition to the big "harp" that was on the stage, there were two more - one on which Krzysztof actually played, and the third we placed at the entrance to the theater in an iron cage, as a symbol of an exalted soul, and when you put your hand to it through the bars, it started to sound.
Whenever I look at a device, I try to see how it can be turned into a musical instrument.
