The Fragmented Orchestra

The Fragmented Orchestra
12 December 2008 - 22 February 2009

Rochelle School is one of 24 sites around the UK participating in The Fragmented Orchestra a project by Jane Grant, John Matthias and Nick Ryan. The Fragmented Orchestra is a huge distributed musical structure modelled on the firing of the human brain's neurons.

To experience the project at Rochelle School look out for the sign on wall under the arched doorway on the lawn or buzz the A Foundation office.

“The Fragmented Orchestra combines conceptually simple but technically precise elements (microphone, speaker, communicator, and ‘neuron’) into an elegant, geographically-distributed network structure. The result, a vast musical brain, promises to generate pieces that touch upon extraordinarily disparate aspects of music and culture, including audience participation, sampling as instrument, endogenous composition, aesthetics of technology, and more. Among the most intriguing of these many resonances is the way in which the fragmented orchestra establishes an audible analogy between the brain and the internet, such that the music produced becomes an artifact of their parallel structures. This composition renders in sound the sense in which the internet is already a singular mind, the collective compositional creativity of the crowd singing in one voice.”
— © Aden Evens
Author, “Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience” (Minnesota University Press)
www.thefragmentedorchestra.com


The Fragmented Orchestra - Sound artist Jane Grant, musician and physicist John Matthias and BAFTA winning composer Nick Ryan have won the PRS Foundation New Music Award 2008.

www.prsfoundation.co.uk