Bacterial Orchestra is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism. It consists of several audio cells. Every cell listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells.
If you happen to be in the same room as Bacterial Orchestra - interact with it. Listen to it’s reactions. The cells communicate with each other, as well as the sound environment they’re placed in.
Every cell has a unique DNA. Only the ones that are musical fit enough survives. If the surroundings doesn’t meet up to its conditions - too noisy, too quiet or no distinct pulse - the cell dies to be reborn with a new set of DNA.
The result is a musical organism adapting to its environment, growing and evolving with neighbouring cells and spectators.
And who knows…if you leave it running long enough, it might even re-invent Mozart.
Or Acid House.
Bacterial Orchestra is a musical installation. It’s built around a number of autonomous cells communicating exclusively through audio.
The idea is simple. Every audio cell consists of microphone and a loudspeaker. Every unit listens to its surroundings and pick up sounds that stand out from the background noise (sounds with an attack). Then the cells listen for additional sounds and try figure out the beat - to play back in rhythm. Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole.
The installation and the ideas behind it can be traced from different areas such as chaos theory, self-organizing systems and artificial intelligence. Bacterial Orchestra is a musical organism that gets smarter. The communication between the cells can be compared with the communication between neurons in the brain, ants in an anthill, Miles Davis and John Coltrane - and other organizing systems.
Every cell is born with a unique set of characteristics (its DNA) that control the way it will react to sound. If it’s not fit enough, the cell dies and is reborn with a new DNA. That way the whole installation evolves and becomes smarter and smarter - in a musical sense.
Since The Bacterial Orchestra’s cells communicate exclusively through sounds it can be scaled to any size. It can be built around 20, 40 or even hundreds of groovy little musical cells. This isolation of the cells allows for cells in one organism to be hosted on several separate computers.
The installation is built around cheap computer loud-speakers (costing roughly 10 euro each) that we rebuilt for the purpose. The idea is that even "lo-fi" electronics can produce "hi-fi" results, especially when scaled to several channels.
The goal? A world wide sound pandemic, of course.