On January 26th, Camac's MIDI harp will be travelling to London again for a day at the Royal Academy of Music. At 2PM, Jakez François and Dominic Murcott will present the MIDI harp. They will explain the instrument and explore it from the perspectives of both composers and harpists, take questions from the floor, and finish with a performance-improvisation for MIDI harp and laptop.
Admission: free!
photo: Yvonne White
You can read about the creation of Camac's MIDI concert harp in the following interview with Jakez François. This interview originally appeared in the Spring-Summer 2009 edition of our quarterly magazine, Harpseasons.
Florence Ledi: When and how did you hit upon the idea of making a MIDI harp?
Jakez François: It was when I was a teenager, and my parents gave me my first electric Camac harp. This was a lever harp, one of Joël Garnier's famous electroharps. At the time, I was playing synthesizers a lot, and I was always going to music shops to try new instruments. It was also around then that Yamaha brought out their famous DX7, one of the first synthesizers with a "dynamic touch" (meaning at last dynamics could be played on it, pp and ff, like on a piano). Above all, it was a MIDI instrument! Thanks to MIDI technology, we could control synthesizers from other synthesizers. This meant we could play ten or more synthesizers simultaneously from one master keyboard, extending the range of available sounds still further. But the biggest revelation was the of the first Roland guitar synthesizer. What a shock I had, when I realised that you could convert the audio signal from a string into a MIDI signal - thereby controlling all the sounds from the synthesizers which fascinated me. So I began to dream of a MIDI harp. It was exactly twenty-five years ago...
When did you move on from dream to project?
At the time, I was only an enthusiastic lever harp student, and moreover I was still at school. The very idea of being a harp maker one day seemed even crazier than becoming an astronaut or a racing driver. When I began to work with Joël Garnier some years later, obviously I was then involved in harp manufacture, and my fantasy of a MIDI harp was always there.
However, Joël's big project at the time was the Blue Harp. At the beginning of the 1990s, we went to present the first prototype at the World Harp Congress in Paris-Sèvres, France, and it was necessary to finish the development to respond to demand. Then we made improvements in the years that followed. And after that, Joël was immersed in constructing the "New Generation" harps. These were presented in 1995, and kept us very busy. The years went by, and the chance to work on the MIDI harp simply never arose. At the end of the 1990s, I spoke about it again to Joël. "I have made the Blue and New Generation harps happen", he answered. "The MIDI harp will be your task." You have to admit that once again, he was right!
How many years of research did you need to make the first prototype a reality?
First of all, it was necessary to finish perfecting the Blue Harp: with its forty-seven pickups, it is the basis of the MIDI harp. We brought the Blue Harp to a point of development where it was possible to connect it to a MIDI converter. From this work's outset, I had a pretty clear idea of the direction we would have to take. We would need a harp with one channel per string, because each string would need to be connected individually to a system analysing frequencies, and then to a conversion system. It did not take me long to manufacture this harp, the first version of which was a lever harp set on the base of an electroharp. But the electronic side of things was another story!
The first stage of the electronic work consisted of attempting MIDI conversions (a MIDI conversion is the computer process which analyses a sound to deduce the midi information from it, information which is provided by the properties of the note played: the start of the note, its intensity, and the end of the note). We used commercial converters, which you can use on pianos, guitars, and wind instruments. If they had worked, they would have been a more rapid and less costly solution!
Unfortunately, the harp presented peculiarities which you find on no other instrument. For example, if the moment where the note begins is quite clearly defined, there is nothing precise about the moment when the note stops. Most of the time, the notes fade into the instrument's general resonance, and the ear abstractly creates an end. But an electronic analysis of a signal is very different. So long as the string vibrates, even at an inaudible level, the pickup - no matter how good it is - continues to give out a signal, which tells the converter that the note has not finished. I know thatnumerous harpists have tried this easy solution of commercial converters, but all rapidly hit a dead-end. The conclusion was plain: it was necessary to move on to develop a system specially for the harp, and so to find the right person to do this.
The second stage took place with a Parisian engineer, who had been strongly recommended to me because he had built Jean-Michel Jarre's "laser harp". The laser harp did not have much in common with a harp, which was only a play of lights which looked like harp strings. The musician "plucked" these "strings" to get sounds - via MIDI! It was actually another of this engineer's projects which was the most interesting for my research: his silent piano system. Several years before Yamaha brought out their famous "Silent Piano", he had developed a system of optically detecting the movements of the piano hammers and converting them into a MIDI signal. The Silent Piano was already available in Paris, before it became famous, and this principle of conversion seemed perfectly adaptable to the harp. Rather than converting a hammer movement, you would convert the pickup signal from the movement of a string on the pickup mic.
Unfortunately, following some collaboration difficulties, the project did not succeed, although we had come so close.
The third stage was my meeting with Andreas Vollenweider, who had developed a midi converter for his own electric harp. He explained to me that he had done it principally to help him write orchestral scores. The collaboration seemed very logical: I could make the harps, but not the MIDI electronics; he had mastered the technological aspect, but not the harp manufacture! Unfortunately we did not take this exceptional musician's stellar success into account. One day he would be in California; two days later in Eastern Europe; he was always on the road, and had little time to devote to this project. After two years we agreed that our collaboration was not realistic, and he returned my midi harp prototype to me.
The fourth stage was probably the one which came closest to actually working. Some time after the episode with Vollenweider, I heard about an American manufacturer who had developed a MIDI harp: David Kortier. I therefore contacted him and invited him to visit me in Mouzeil. David had developed an extremely ingenious system, which was both simple and reliable. In fact he had approached the problem from the opposite angle: rather than trying to analyse the frequencies of the notes, which required enormous processors, he "simply" worked to detect which pickup the signal came from. For example: if a signal came from pickup number ten, that would be a C. In addition, his MIDI converter managed dynamics very well.
The system was very appealing, and not too expensive. I proposed we equip our pedal harps with his converters. Unfortunately, after having realized a prototype of a MIDI/Kortier pedal harp, we came up against a problem of technical compatibility which could never be totally resolved - and which, in any case, did not allow me to commercialize this instrument.
The last stage was finally successful, but it was also certainly the most expensive. Around the same time that I realized the Kortier/Camac solution could not work, I became acquainted with a German manufacturer, Bernhard Schmidt. Schmidt had realized a lever midi prototype thanks to a commercial system for guitar, and he exhibited this instrument at the Rencontres Internationales de Harpe Celtique in Dinan, France. The representative of the German laboratory who had manufactured this converter organised a meeting with Bernhard and me, to which Bernhard brought his prototype. I was very enthusiastic about the result. For the first time, I had the impression that I was playing a real musical instrument, and not a kind of assembly of switches that triggered sounds with varying degrees of sensitivity.
The system underneath it all was Axon technology: an integral converter which used artificial intelligence to analyse the real frequency of the note played. The analysis was very fast: the response time between playing the string and hearing the sound played by the synthesizer was practically nothing. The time needed by the string to produce the sound, and for this sound to reach our ears, was almost identical to that needed by the system to analyse and convert the pickup signal.
Unfortunately, the system needed so much power that it could only sound six strings at a time - as many as a guitar. The first prototype that Bernard Schmidt showed me consisted of five systems piled together, for a total of thirty strings. Even though the result was interesting, the instrument was unmanageable, with its tons of connections at the back, and all the paraphernalia it needed for everything to work simultaneously. I dreamed of a harp with the MIDI system entirely built in, and for that it was necessary to develop a real MIDI converter for the harp, based on this Axon technology. I nearly killed myself when I got the quote for the cost of developing this, but having never been so close to success, and being very convinced by the possibilities of the technology, I agreed, and launched the development. It was to take two years. After some months of work, it appeared that there simply was no processor on the market powerful enough to generate a system of forty-seven strings, and we had to wait some months more before sufficiently competent equipment was finally available.
After all these adventures, the midi system finally saw the light of day this year. The first playable prototype was finished in time to travel to London, where it was presented for the first time at the Camac Harp Days at Trinity College of Music.
Did you despair, sometimes, even often?
Despair is a strong word, but I was very often disappointed! At each of the stages described above, I was very enthusiastic and so sure that this time we would get there, that the disappointment was as great as my hopes had been. But when we saw the result, all the waiting had been worth it.
The final instrument is not only everything I hoped for, but in many respects, it has greatly surpassed my expectations. I had never thought that we would come to create an electronic instrument so faithful to the harp. The technology also offers functions that I had never imagined at the beginning, like the stereo configurations for its acoustic, the integration of a module of more than five hundred sounds you can use right away, and the wonderful interface programme that allows you to control the level and response of each of the forty-seven strings individually.
Why a MIDI harp? Why do it?
That is the big question for harpists and composers to answer. The harp’s potential is so varied and so vast, that it is difficult to imagine all its possible uses. Aside from the ability to play a piano or organ sound on a harp (spectacular, but nonetheless old news in the electronic music world), or to key in a score on a computer, the MIDI harp allows us to enter into the electronic music world with our instrument, in all its forms.
I would like to point out that the MIDI harp is not a revolution at all, because all instruments already exist in a MIDI version! We have only caught up on the delay the harp suffered compared with the technological evolution of other instruments and other music of today. Bear in mind that the MIDI guitar has existed for more than twenty years, and all study pianos can include a MIDI converter as an option. Even wind instruments have been developed with MIDI - there is a MIDI saxophone in the Metropolitan Museum in New York! It is time for the harp to share this evolution.
How much time remains between the current prototype, and the harp going on sale?
I am quite optimistic, and I think that we should be in a position to deliver MIDI harps next year, perhaps even at the end of 2009. We already have some instruments in production.
What future do you see for this instrument?
The reaction of Dominic Murcott, Head of Composition and Music at Trinity College of Music, is a very good indicator of what could happen. At first quite reticent when Gabriella Dall'Olio presented the idea of a MIDI harp to him during preparations for the Camac Days, he totally changed his mind when he tried the instrument out. I understood that he had not expected at all to find such a responsive and high-performing instrument. For him, MIDI technology was more or less synonymous with "bottom range" instruments as this technology is widespread today in popular instruments like synthesizers, or in musical computer programmes. But after this first experience, Dominic perceived the new horizons the harp could offer. From that moment, he constantly came up with ideas for projects, of all kinds and from all kinds of angles. If all composers who have the chance to try this new instrument have the same reaction, we can be very optimistic regarding the future of the harp in real music. And to know that the BBC are already engaged in creating the first concerto for MIDI harp and orchestra on the initiative of Sioned Williams is equally an excellent sign for the future.
