String Theory: Jack Armitage’s Strengjavera

A grand piano sits in the Nordic House, wires streaming out of its frame, as magnets pull its strings to create eerie and captivating sounds. Jack Armitage — a 34-year-old musician, coder, composer, researcher, and doctor of media & arts technologies — feeds the piano data collected from developing slime molds and birds murmuring. Jack records this, and a year and a half later presses it onto vinyl.

“I really feel like I’ve never heard a piano make these sounds,” Jack states, much to my agreement. The unique sound of Strengjavera has a twofold explanation: the specific instrument Jack used to make the album, and how they used it. Jack employed what’s called a “Magnetic Resonator Piano” (to them, the “MRP”), an instrument that they learned about during their PhD at Queen Mary University of London. “You know, I was aware of the instrument, but it wasn’t part of my research, so I could only kind of admire it from afar,” Jack says, adding, “but very luckily, when I joined the Intelligent Instruments Lab in Reykjavík for my postdoctoral research, the lab purchased the Magnetic Resonator Piano. There’s less than 10 in the world.”

Usually, an artist will play the Magnetic Resonator Piano, which produces different sounds based on how heavily the pianist presses on the keys. That weight determines how strongly the magnet pushes or pulls the piano’s strings, which warps the sound.

But Jack wanted to take the instrument to an even newer frontier, explaining, “There’s this extra world that the MRP opens up that I hadn’t seen used in a way that I wanted to use it.” He created this extra world by removing the human performer, controlling the piano instead with a “biologically inspired system.”

Biologically inspired system?

Jack’s artist’s statement for Strengjavera reads: “Bird flocking and slime mold algorithms stimulate grand piano strings via electromagnetic fields.” I find myself quite lost comprehending how a flock of birds translates to an algorithm, and how that commands a piano, so I ask for a deeper explanation.
“Bird flocking and slime mold algorithms stimulate grand piano strings via electromagnetic fields.”

They mention the help of a project by fellow Intelligent Instruments Lab researcher Victor Shepardsen named Anguilla. “In practice, it is called interactive machine learning,” Jack explains. “It’s not like big corporate machine learning. This is where you have a very small amount of data and you want to interactively create this relationship, rather than only train it once.” Essentially, there’s a massive output of data as the particles of natural systems like ant colonies, schools of fish, birds, and mold shift location and vary speeds. Then, Jack compresses “that huge output into some numbers that fit onto the frequencies of the piano strings.”

Surrendering to the system

Jack then “gives up control” by creating a feedback loop; he lets the biologically inspired system listen and adapt to the sounds it creates itself with the Magnetic Resonator Piano. “I am kind of imitating the way that we don’t have control over nature and natural systems and complex systems in general,” he emphasises.”You can watch the piece for 10 minutes, and you get the feeling that nothing has changed, but also something has changed. You can’t really put your finger on exactly what it is, and I can’t either as the artist, but in a way, that’s kind of the point.”

Here, Jack is referring to Strengjavera’s first iteration as an installation in the Nordic House. The system ran for hours, growing and shifting throughout the day. They tell me that running the system autonomously needed some guidance because, unlike humans, the system wouldn’t take natural pauses, and the magnets could have gotten too hot and burnt up. However, “at the end of the installation, when I knew I didn’t have that much time left, I just turned up all the parameters on the piano and ran it pretty hard to see how it would sound.” This experiment ended up greatly shaping the second half of the album, which let Jack “retroactively fit a linear narrative onto a piece that didn’t have any.”

“Promise of life…threat of decay”

The album is pressed onto vinyl by one of the few with the capabilities to cut vinyl in Iceland, the Fish Factory Creative Centre of Stöðvarfjörður. Using a grant from the Iceland Music Fund, Jack collaborated with artists María Elísabet Bragadóttir and Arna Beth to create track titles and cover art. Each took their own approach to the emotions evoked by the sounds of Strengjavera.

María Elísabet constructed a short story that was split into lines for the track titles, an example is “a dark fruit, swollen and perfumed, radiating anticipation, the promise of life but also the threat of decay if it were ever forgotten.” Arna Beth created an artwork for the cover that realises this pulsing and uncanny “string being.”

Jack mentions that the three of them kept returning to a theme of “otherness,” both relating to the piano as “other” but also in a broader sense. “In the period when this record has come together, the genocide in Gaza has been progressing from one stage of nightmare to another, and I just felt like I couldn’t really release a record during this period without reflecting on this basic kind of failure of humanity. And otherness plays, I think, quite a central role.”

Jack reflects on the role of art. “Nothing I can do as an artistic offering is ever going to be any real significance compared to the events of the last few years, and ongoing. But I think the only thing I could try to offer is some sort of meditative space.”

To offer this meditative space, Strengjavera distributor Mengi Records will host a listening session at Mengi on August 29. The evening promises a cosy listening environment and a conversation with Jack.