An orchestra’s archive becomes an instrument played with magnets

Stacco gives a musician something to push, roll and feel. Moving magnets across the instrument changes control signals sent to sound-generating software; the magnetic fields can also offer resistance under the player’s hand. Its designers built a physical way to explore a trained model’s sound.[3]

The instrument features in Robert Laidlow’s TECHNO-UTOPIA, scheduled for 30 October at Berlin’s Haus des Rundfunks. Zubin Kanga is the soloist on piano, keyboards and Stacco, with Vimbayi Kaziboni conducting the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin.[2]

Laidlow and collaborators Nicola Privato and Victor Shepardson worked with a BBC archive spanning 2,600 hours. They trained neural audio models on selected subsets, turning characteristics of orchestral recordings into material a soloist could reshape during performance.[1]

Learning the instrument

In a 2024 interview with Bela, designer Giacomo Lepri explained that a neural synthesis control can change several qualities of a sound together. The overlapping magnetic fields reflect that entanglement. Privato described learning to return to positions by feeling magnetic resistance. This is a skill to practise: movement, listening and touch help the player discover a useful response.[3]

The same interview distinguishes ordinary synthesis running inside the instrument from neural synthesis using a connected laptop. The tactile interface gives the performer direct control without requiring every part of the computation to fit inside the wooden body.[3]

An archive inside a composition

Laidlow’s programme note describes a concerto whose structure grows out of these instruments. In the first movement, pressure on an expressive keyboard controls tiny orchestral samples. At the transition to the second, Stacco takes the previous movement’s closing sound and transforms it through a neural model. A fragment just heard becomes the material for the next passage.[4]

The final movement broadens the idea of a musical archive. Its sources include sounds tied to Laidlow’s own life: a wedding folk song, a school jazz band, birdsong and a medical voice. The composer’s account connects their significance to personal memory. That gives the work a second question alongside what the technology can make: what a particular sound means to its listener.[4]

The collaborators’ NIME paper records how Kanga made the instrument his own during rehearsals. He used tiny movements of one magnet and let sounds linger, developing a different approach from the composer’s. In one passage he explored an imitation of birdsong. The account shows interpretation emerging through the player’s encounter with the instrument.[1]

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