Music Orchard

Artists: Damian Barbeler (Australia) / Tim Jetis (Australia) / John Taylor (Australia) 
Collaborators: Ciaran Frame (Australia) 

Music Orchard asks the question: "What would life be like if music and light could grow on trees?"

This poetic work takes the form of an orchard with just one single special tree, with spheres of various sizes hanging like electric fruit, glowing and emitting a range of musical sounds. Sophisticated technologies, hidden inside each globe, allow them to behave as if they are alive and aware of their surroundings.

Left untouched, the work performs a beautiful sound and light display, with colours and musical layers flowing back and forth across the sculpture. However Music Orchard is also interactive; a touch to any individual globe will cause it to animate and perform its very own pre-programed solo in the form of a short melody and light display.

Participants can move around the tree trying out all the different melodies, eventually finding their favourite ‘fruit’. The different melodies also work together; as more than one participant moves around the light sculpture and touches the fruit, different melodies are triggered and a large-scale and ever-changing musical composition is created.

Printed on each globe is an abstract graphic symbol evoking the character or musical personality of that particular ‘fruit’. Each globe also displays a unique QR code which can be read by a smart phone so visitors can access a copy of a favourite melody from the orchard of sound and light.

In this way the audience members can actually ‘pick’ the sounds of the fruit from Music Orchard and take the music away with them as a sound file – a unique souvenir of a ‘fruitful’ festival experience.

Country represented by installation: Australia