Lo-Fi Orchestra – 4’33”

It’s been a while since my last Lo-Fi Orchestra performance, so today I thought I’d do something special.  If you follow my blog, you might know I quite like contemporary ideas in music.  I implemented Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood on relays and have experimented with phasing in relays, sequences and more recently rhythms.

And whilst I’ve alluded to John Cage here and there, I’ve never actually “performed” any of his works.  So on this special day I thought it would be very fitting to perform perhaps one of his most famous works: 4’33”.

This work has always sparked controversy.  Is it music?  Is there such a thing as silence?  What was the point of it?  Why does the score cost £9.95?  Some really like it though, as evidenced by this online review of the score.

But whilst I’ve found a modular synthesizer version, a Death Metal version, and even a virtual, online version, I so far haven’t found an 8-bit synthesis version.

But how to do that?  Well I didn’t want to just sit there with a stop watch, so my first thought was to do what I usually do. Program it into MuseScore and let a PC play it for me.  So I put together the score in MuseScore3, based on this version of the manuscript.

The first performance had the pianist indicating the start of the piece by closing the piano lid and indicating the endings by opening it again.  In this version, I wanted to capture the background noises of the Lo-Fi electronics, so I wanted everything turned on throughout.

But the MIDI score wasn’t really controlling the orchestra enough for me, so I thought I’d get the Lo-Fi Orchestra to “play itself”. After all it is all electronic and I’ve already worked with relays.  So I put together the Arduino Timed Relay to act as the “conductor” for the piece.  To keep things simple, I’ve combined the three movements into one for the sake of this performance.

One of the challenges of this piece is that I usually use a relatively directional microphone to capture the audio from the Lo-Fi Orchestra “live” but that, by design, doesn’t do well for ambient sounds.  So in keeping with the Lo-Fi nature of this performance, I switched to my PC’s built-in microphone which is a lot less selective.

So in the video below you can hear 18 Arduino Unos, 11 Arduino Nanos, one Pro Mini, an Adafruit Feather 32U4, and a Raspberry Pi in what might be the first Lo-Fi, 8-bit synthesized version of John Cage’s 4’33”.

Notable moments in this performance include:

• The massive lo-fi surge of interference at “switch on” at 0’00”.
• Followed immediately by a bit of “chirping” as my MT-32 Pi boots.
• You can hear the background audio hum throughout (of course) as well as a bit of audio “whistling” in places.
• The “ticking” you hear comes from my Roland UM-ONE doing its Active Sensing on the MIDI link.
• You can hear me fidgeting a little here and there.
• I don’t know what the “thump” at 1’20” was…
• My creaking chair makes an entry at 1’58” and again at 3’22”.
• A pigeon sounds up at 2’13” which was nice (there is very, very quiet birdsong throughout, but you could only really hear that “live”).
• The guest star is my clock striking 9am at 3’37”!
• There is a curious final flourish of a sound at 4’12” that I can’t quite identify, but it might be something PC related.
• At 4’30” you can hear me moving to get my Lo-Fi Orchestra sign in preparation for the final “switch off” sound at 4’33”.

In summary, I’m very pleased with that result.  Watch it in full below.

You can read more about the Lo-Fi Orchestra in this introduction or this explainer.

All music rights and copyright with original authors, composers, producers, artists, and so on.