Last week, Jakez and I went to London for a MIDI harp day at the Royal Academy of Music. Together with composer Dominic Murcott, Jakez presented the harp to harpists in the morning, and the afternoon session was held from the composer's perspective.
A MIDI harp is not the same as an electric harp. An electric harp uses electricity to amplify the sound of a harp. It can have a sound box and also function as an acoustic harp (like Camac's Big Blue concert electric harp), or it can have a solid body and only sound when amplified, like an electric guitar or some of Camac's other electric harps. You can put the sound through effects pedals and distort it, add reverb or similar, but your core sound is that of a plucked string, that is, of a harp.
A Big Blue harp with an acoustic sound box, but also a pickup on each string so the sound may be amplified.
A solid-body electric lever harp, that only sounds when the amplification is switched on.
A MIDI harp also uses electricity, but additionally has a relationship with a computer. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. When you pluck the string of a MIDI harp, instead of the sound going directly into an amplifier and simply being made louder, the plucked string emits frequencies, which are picked up and interpreted by the inbuilt computer (the MIDI converter) in the harp. The converter sends the MIDI characteristics of the played note to the inbuilt synthesizer (a sound module, in other words). If you prefer, instead of the internal synthesizer you can use an external laptop, a synthesizer, an external sound module known as an expander, or any kind of electronic equipment that can be connected to the instrument via MIDI. Whatever equipment you direct the MIDI signal to, it will produce the result. This could be a sound - harp piano, violin, saxophone, percussion, electric guitar, full choir - or it could trigger events, such as activating an effect, start recording a loop, switching on a light, or playing a video. The possibilities are endless.
Camac's MIDI harp has a solid soundboard, not a sound box, and so can function as both an electric harp and a MIDI instrument, but not an acoustic harp. If you want to play the MIDI harp, you need two things:
Photo: Yvonne White
- a MIDI harp
- amplification
The MIDI harp's own sound module has more than five hundred sounds. Of these, you can store up to 128 in the harp at any one time. Once stored, you can change between these sounds using a button on the harp's left-hand side. If the stored sounds are enough for what you are doing at the time, it is recommended that you play the harp unconnected to a computer, to avoid interference from programmes designed more for editing than performance.
If you wish to organize and alter the sounds in the inbuilt sound module, or adjust how the harp reacts to your playing, then you need a computer. You can use either Mac or PC, which is connected to the harp via Firewire.
The harp comes with software specially designed for the harp. You install this software onto your computer, connect the harp to it, also connect the harp to an amp so you can hear what you are doing, and then you are ready to programme the sounds and effects you want.
MIDI HARP - Blue Itsuo by Arnaud Roy - HARPE MIDI from Arnoterra on Vimeo.
The MIDI harp is compatible with any standard MIDI software. Writing for the MIDI harp is like writing for concert pedal harp, plus MIDI. All MIDI effects are possible - such as controlling visual images from the instrument, or using the harp to notate a score directly from playing. In the video below, Jakez, Dominic and Sioned Williams put score writing to the test with John Parry's Sonata in D!
In short, the MIDI harp uses computer processing to unlock a vast range of practical, sonic and performance possibilities. Every harpist enjoys having a go on the MIDI harp and saying "ooh, it sounds like a choir/drum/noseflute!", but as Jakez and Dominic explained at the MIDI harp's launch in 2009, the existence of a concert harp that can sound like a noseflute is not interesting if that is only how you see it. Many instruments already exist in MIDI form, particularly keyboards. You can buy a basic MIDI keyboard very cheaply and change the sound to bagpipes or noseflute: the principle is the same, and not, in itself, a new one.
Electronic and computerized (synthesized) sounds have become key players in today's musical landscape, but they have not done so by sounding like other instruments, or by pretending in any other way to be something they're not. Interesting computer music has brought new sounds and technical possibilities that are its own. Computer music is also capable of a fascinating dialogue with older forms, for example, with the instruments we have used for up to hundreds of years. Naturally, this is the relationship that interests harpists and the MIDI harp.
As with noseflute sounds, computer treatments of harps can quickly become un-fascinating if they are not done well. Some concerts feature an amplified harp, but where the music that comes out of it is nothing that couldn't have been done by the guy at the back with a laptop on his own. The harp looks cool, which is fine, but how much musical point has the exercise? Equally, there are many successful pieces, such as two I heard Ann Yeung perform at the World Harp Congress in Dublin in 2005. In Alvarez Javier's Acuerdos
por Diferencia (1989)
for harp and tape, the tape imitates the
harp sounds, but in unplayable figurations. The impossible figures
weave about the live performer, entrancing us as much by their
unattainability as by their brilliance. There’s a powerfully plastic
flow around both limits and the limitless. Nebulae, Stephen Andrew Taylor’s music-and-video
work, is another celebration of “things [the harp] can’t do in the real world…the long, drifting
sounds I was imagining reminded me of photographs of nebulas, giant dust clouds
in deep space – so vivid and luminous, but impossibly distant and vast at the
same time”.
Gimmicks, as Dominic Murcott reminded us throughout the presentation last week, are simply not interesting. A harp that sounds like a trumpet is no more significant than a MIDI keyboard on the trumpet setting. In contrast, beginning with a sound or technique particular to the harp and developing a relationship between it and its computerized processing could become a journey or story, moreover one where the fact it was a harp on the stage is important.
Another potentially powerful effect is something Dominic used Max/MSP software to create: a patch which enables the MIDI harp to use triggers, where you can set particular strings to turn effects on or off. You can also play a phrase that triggers a recording of what you play after that - which you can then turn on or off again later, layering it with other things. One audience member wrote to me afterwards:
"What I found particularly interesting was the way the player or composer can set triggers, so that particular notes will spark off a recorded sequence of notes, or a change of sound or pitch. This seems to me like what cells in the body do, with their codes to set off certain types of dividing and replication and specialization. As an utterly new kind of instrument (it’s NOT just a synthesiser operated with harp strings rather than a keyboard), it is therefore profoundly connected with current developments in genetic research and engineering, and the improvisations that can be incorporated by both player and composer relate, I think, to the postmodern way in which art – using new technologies – can respond to the present moment and unfold as it is made, rather than being fully planned and structured in advance."
As with any art, it is impossible to define all the possibilities of a MIDI harp now. But we
hope it will enjoy a bright future, not as a toy. May it be used to create what is interesting and moving, like all fine music, no matter in which era it begins.
The first concerto for MIDI harp and orchestra, composed by Graham Fitkin, will be premiered by Sioned Williams and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in January 2011. This commission is supported by Camac Harps and the PRS for Music Foundation.
