As a final test of the feasability of building and performing on the Metal Petals, I made a small scale model of the instrument from heavy paper foam board, and set the camera upon it.

The camera now is first keying out much of the background to make the image simpler, and then tracking 4 points on the petals. These points directly correspond to pitch, playback speed, position randomness (where in the course of the music a particular grain of sound is playing), and the length of the grain in milliseconds.

As spec’ed out in the beginning, the piece starts as noise. As I started to cut and bending the petals, the music became somewhat recognizable as the various elements shifted closer to “normal”. There is unpredictable interplay between the elements since shifting one petal sometimes pushes another petal to a new position. I feel this makes the piece more interesting from an improvisatory outlook.

In the end, the petals were totally cut up and flattened, and the song was just recognizable enough. All in all it was an almost perfect culmination of what I’d had in mind months ago. Now i need to transpose it up to the scale of a full human body.

This project has been carefully planned out and the creation process has been set up in discrete stages with clear goals since the very beginning, thanks to Gideon’s organizational skills, and my own interest in organizing myself and maintaining the purity of the idea regardless of technology, aesthetics, or any other tangential considerations. All in all, I feel like I’ve achieved most of my goals, whether or not the actual public performance goes well.