Viola Yip on her work Bulbble
Read my interview with an a Berlin-based experimental composer from Hong-Kong Viola Yip on her work Bulbble. It is centred around an instrument called “Bulbble” that the composer started building herself in 2019. This was her first experience building an instrument and the idea behind it was to create an instrument with lights. The instrument consists of light bulbs and relays. Initially it also included buttons that could be controlled, but over time the composer developed a copper capacitive sensor in order to perform light in a musical way. Viola Yip says that she thinks of light as very musical and subtle, but very complex at the same time. Her interest was to create a system that works for her and can turn these qualities into musical rhythms, light, shadows, presenting different sorts of subtleties and spontaneity. Bulbble receives an Honorary Mention from Giga Hertz Preis from ZKM (Center for Arts and Media) in Karlsruhe in 2021. The text version of interview was created by Armands Stefans Sargsuns.
Who commissioned the piece?
It was a self-initiated project. I did it on my own. In the end it lines up very well that a string quartet in New York called The Rhythm Method started a series in The Cell theatre. They wanted to present music that is out of the box, so I ended up premiering my piece over there.
Why did you name the piece “Bulbble”?
I wanted something quick and easy. I find the piece very bubbly, like bubble — bubbly. Then, I was like, “Oh, but I’m playing bulbs,” so I came to the name “Bulbble”. A very quick and dirty way of finding a name for my instrument.
How long is the piece?
It’s not like a traditional piece that has a fixed duration. I designed the instrument for improvising, so there’s no fixed duration, but I usually play it somewhere between 20 to 45 minutes. If necessary, sometimes people ask me for 10 minutes and then I will also do it. Well, the range is pretty wide.
Watch full interview:
How is the instrument built?
There are relays. Initially I built it for four channels and now I usually play with eight channels. Right now the eight channel ones have eight relays, eight light bulbs, eight sets of controllers and they’re all powered by Arduino.
Watch Bulbble:
How do you play the instrument?
There are at least two levels of making the light perform, two levels of execution that makes the light play in the way it played. One level is the interface design, so like I said I have capacitive sensors that are made of copper tape and they are programmed actually pretty straightforward. There are three sets of controllers. One set is that when you hit a button one light will flicker and it will flicker at a particular speed which is controlled by a potential operator, so I have a little knob in front of me to control the speed. That speed is mapped between the slowest which is about maybe once per second, like the frequency of flickering so it can be like, “Tick-tick-tick,” pretty steady. The fastest speed is the fastest that I mapped it to how fast the relays can do, so the maximum capacity of the relay. I don’t have a specific frequency, it’s about 72 Hertz or around that. When you turn the knob up to around 30 Hertz, actually when you turn up to around 20 Hertz you start adhering the subtones and when you go up to 30 Hertz it’s just Acoustics 101 where you start hearing a pitch. That becomes like a very mechanical synthesiser, if you want to say it like that. You hear a pitch that comes from the frequency of the machine flickering and they all come from the sound of the relay, because it’s an electromagnetic switch. Every time you switch it on and off you hear a click sound. When it comes to higher than 30 Hertz then you start hearing a pitch and I’ve started using that as my pitch material.
It depends on the space as well, every time is a little different. It’s about like 10 to 12 pitches that the switch can create. Once it goes up to a point where the switch doesn’t hit the circuit anymore, it doesn’t have the sound anymore, so that I call that the end of the spectrum. Of course, whenever you flick the light you see the light bulbs flickering on and off and when it goes faster and faster you don’t see the light flickering on and off anymore. It becomes so fast that you see the light being dimmed. That’s where I find a lot of qualities that can be played, can be present in a very subtle way like music, at least that’s how I see it. I come from a classical music background. All the instruments that I’ve built are played based on an aspect that I don’t want to play on the electric traditional instrument, but I like to find a way to transform what I like in playing music from a traditional instrumental setup to a handmade instrumental setup.
Going back to the light, when you tune them in different pitches, in different frequencies you see the different qualities in the light. That is some of the basic design of it. Along the way I find a lot of unexpectations, surprises. It’s very interesting that I’m playing with the vibrations in the vibrating in the flickering system and at the same time this vibration system actually also works with AC power, the power from the wall. When you are in the US the wall power frequency is 60 Hertz and in Europe the frequency power is 50 Hertz, if I remember correctly. When I play the lights with the tuning, the frequency, when I’m in Europe, when it’s 50 Hertz and when you turn it to 49 or 51 you immediately see it, because there is a one frequency one Hertz difference. You see that the light suddenly from flickering becomes a sine wave, like fading in and out. It’s very visual and you can’t control it from my system, because in my system there’s no fading mechanism in there. Oftentimes my lights are not dimmable, so you can’t really turn it like a sine wave, like very smooth. When you see the cycle is about once a second then you know that it’s either 49 Hertz or 51 Hertz and when you turn a tiny bit the control is not very smooth, so it really depends on how the switch behaves. When you turn tiny bits sometimes you see three cycles a second, sometimes if you’re lucky you can still keep turning very tiny bits and you will get five cycles per second, so it’s either 55 Hertz or 45 Hertz. I don’t have a perfect pitch, so that’s how I get the information, but that becomes a very musical element. These are the musical materials that I can really play with. Of course, as a classically trained musician three cycles per second is just triplets and five cycles per second is quintuplets. That contrasts very much with the poses before 30 Hertz or like a pitch like D, so these are different ways of generating contrast in materials.
At the same time I find light is such a musical medium that is quite different from how sounds work in music. A lot of times I feel the temperature from the light bulbs, in the beginning I was mostly working with incandescent light bulbs. Especially in the beginning the warmth is a part of it. You feel the temperature, you feel the flickering, you feel the very warm sensations around you. At the same time looking at lights is very musical in a very visual way. Different qualities just make me feel very differently on my body. It’s very similar to listening to sound, but it doesn’t come from the ears, it’s from the eyes and that sensation is similar, but not exactly the same. I find that there are a lot of spaces where I can play them as music and at the same time it’s just a matter of fact: you have you have light and I have my body on stage, I have other stuff on the stage. You create massive shadows on the wall, if there’s a wall behind you. I also find that very interesting, I find that very musical also in a very unusual way that it’s not just the rhythm, it’s just not just the shadows. When I play the light bulbs in front of me, if the wall is very close to me, then the shadow is very huge. If you blow the shadow almost as high as the ceiling or the height of the wall, it’s hard to describe, because nobody really talks about in that way, in that sense, but I find it very interesting, because it’s as tall as the size of the wall or the size of the room the shadow the performative shadow sort of creates an illusion at least to my eyes that the architecture is changing.
In some ways the architecture or part of the very, very surface is all about playing with light and shadow in the space and that’s how you perceive the space. I find it very interesting that when I play with light and shadow that’s what it does to my eyes, like it really changes the space in a very performative way, because I’m performing. I didn’t really care about them all actually, usually I don’t see the wall, so I can only focus on what I play. Of course, before the show I usually try to find a way to place my light in a way that has a very nice shadow play, that has a variety of shadows just coming out mostly from my own body. Then, when I play, when I see the video or sometimes I make someone play my instrument, I see that in the space. It’s very interesting that it really changes the architecture, my perception of architecture and playing that in a musical way means the architecture is being played musically. I felt like that was the time I could also play with the space. Not just audibly, not just sonically, but also spatially. In the end I find out that the instrument, if it’s in the right venue, I’m actually playing the sounds of the relays, I’m playing the musical quality of the lights, of the shadows, how they can be played together in a very concise setup just over my table. At the same time I can also play in the space when you view it from the audience perspective, so I find that very powerful.
It was something that I learned over the working process. As you remember in the beginning I was just like, “I just want to do something with the relays that create pitches that can also trigger the lights at the same time.” For me the instrument became a big agent, so it has a big agency, not just the light, but the whole setup. The materials that I chose become big agents, a big medium for me to really play with every time. I really enjoy this improvising system, because wherever I go I just go into the space, I work with the distance between me and the wall and how the Shadows can be played in a way that’s very space sensitive. At the same time it depends on what is available. Sometimes I put all the light bulbs on the table, sometimes I have all the mic stands hanging the light bulbs and the shadow is very different. The sounds are always the same, the sound qualities are always the same. When I play every time in different venues I amplify it every time. I’ve realised that there are times that when in the different speaker systems or in different acoustic spaces some partials can be brought out a little more. In some spaces the sounds bring a little more, sometimes the audience will tell me that actually in that sound system some frequency sits in that side of the room and the other frequencies sit in the other side of the room, so they are “spaceialized” in an unintentional way. I did not intend to do this, but it becomes part of the piece which I find surprising and pleasant, and fun every time we just go into the space and find out what you can find. In a way the instrument also doesn’t just allow me to improvise, it pushes me to improvise
Are there improvisational aspects for playing the instrument?
In a way. These instruments have different levels of it. I always like seeing building circuits as a way of making my compositions, because you decide how these things are behaving. I mean, I didn’t really have the background of engineering, so I really learned circuitry along the way that I found out that the circa tests, different hierarchies depend on how you put different buttons in different places in the circuit. You have different control over the lights. Of course, I was using Arduino, then there’s also a layer of how I programmed it, there’s a layer of how I put the buttons and controllers together, which one is more powerful than the other. In the early version of my lights I have a button that is “more powerful” than the other one, so when I hit that one I cannot control this one. If I turn it the other way around, there was one time I didn’t know I put the circuit the other way around and the light bulbs behave completely differently.
That was the time I realised that the circuit is not just about me doing things right and wrong,
it’s more about how I put it, because they behave very differently. These are the things that just control the current flows, how the circuit works. Essentially the way you put the buttons and controllers is the way you control the behaviour, so I started to realise that building circuits is a way for me to build my compositions. You decide, you determine how the light bulbs are gonna flicker, how you put your hands. This light instrument is built for myself, so I only need to concern my own body, how I put my hands, how I like to play it, how I like buttons to be put, how to put the buttons in a way that I can have a very interesting combination of things or usually the way I do it is to find a way to maximise the possibility.
What is the compositional structure for this piece?
For this one, because it has relays, I mostly structure around the rhythmic structure, so how I put the buttons and controllers to create that works in a specific way that it has these kinds of rhythms. I decided the rhythmic range of the relays and how I control it, so the sets, the combination of the buttons and and the knob that I can control, how much I can control. You can control it by choosing that you have seven kinds of rhythms, but I decided to just make it a gradation, so that I have maximum control by just turning off.
It’s really hard to exactly answer your question, because I can only tell you how I design it and that becomes my compositional structure. I call it this way, because the reason why I explain all these things is because I realised although I intended to make it an improvisatory instrument I can’t avoid this compositional layer that I need to decide where things are as I’m not working with a machine that I bought somewhere, I’m working with a machine that I built. There are a lot of things that are very flexible, there are a lot of possibilities and once I put them together I don’t want to change them in the middle of the performance. The way I do it is I solder everything, so they are fixed, but in every performance you would recognize that however I improvise with it there is a character, there’s a quality by which you can tell that this is “Bulbble” and it’s not another piece.
Of course, there’s also a layer of me always being the performer of the instrument. This is another layer that I wanted to describe, but I forgot and moved on. There’s a layer that I work with my own body. I was very interested in translating the sort of musical things, the musical imaginations that I have and into controlling this light setup on the controller.
Going back to the compositional perspective, I was only interested in working with myself on this instrument. Of course, later on I started to bring this instrument playing with other people that actually becomes a slightly different story, but a lot of things are really built according to how I imagine music, how I wanted to translate my music, how much flexibility I wanted, how many fixed parameters I wanted to have. I see them as compositional decisions that I needed to make before the instrument was finished in the building process. Also, I spent a lot of time working with the circuit once I built something, I played it, I went back to tweak it and I played it, and I finished it. I still played for quite some time before I really said that this is my instrument in a way that I feel like I’m very fluent in this setup. That’s sort of my compositional approach these days. Since then all the instruments that I built (so far I built four instruments) and three of them were made for myself, and each of them is sort of based on this way of working to develop sounds and performances in different directions.
What was the process of building this instrument?
It’s a continuous process. I mean, I always find that building instruments like that is a constant work in progress. For this “Bulbble” I spent one day to realise that what I imagined could actually work, I was very sceptical. I had been working with midi controllers, dimmers, lights before, but I wasn’t really satisfied. That was the time when I wanted and I was tempted to build a machine, but, of course, I hesitated for a long time before I started. It took me one day to realise that my idea actually could work.
I mean, it’s not so much about how much time I needed in order to build the instrument. Like I said, I don’t have an engineering background. I really needed to learn how to build a circuit myself, so actually that took most of the time. It took me on and off two months to put the whole instrument together and premiere it. It was about two months without working on it every day. You spend most of the time learning, putting them together. At that time as a newbie for me it took me about two days to put them together, so that was the version that I played with four light bulbs, it’s a smaller setup.
Once I built it I think every time when I have had a performance I took that as an opportunity to push one element a little further like performance wise, on a performance level. Of course, the first one I played in a way that I imagined. And then every performance after every performance you realise that there is one more thing that you could do. Also, like I said this instrument sonically and visually is very space sensitive. I could only learn things by bringing it to another venue, playing it and seeing how it goes or to see what is available. Every venue has different things to offer like the size of the table, the number of microphone stands that I could use or the size of the wall.
There was one time I learned quite a lot, because I was playing in a location that I think used to be a market, like an old market that doesn’t exist anymore. They had a lot of wood pieces in the space and I decided to put them behind me like with a sculptural approach that plays with my lights. I realised that, it’s not like I don’t realise that they’re creating a shadow, but the way I put it accidentally has had a really nice effect. That was the time that inspired me to really spend time before the show to really put the lights and objects in a way that could have a very interesting shadow. Not that I didn’t do before that point, but that was the very interesting shadow that really motivated me to next time if I had a chance, to put my body in a particular way that has the most amount of interesting shadow, so that it becomes visual, spatial.
Over time different spaces offer you different things. In the beginning I was only focusing on expanding the gestures that I could do in the lights and then I focused on the shadow, and then I focused on thinking if my controlling system, my controlling interface, is the optimal one for myself. I told you in the beginning I have some buttons that I can play like a little piano, some people describe it that way and I realised that the button creates a lot of tension on my fingertip. That it actually doesn’t allow me to play very long. After 20 minutes I don’t practise piano anymore, so it gets tiring very quickly. Also, there are times that I really want to play fast, but then it’s really limited by how strong my fingers are which are not, my fingers are not very strong. I really like intense music, I really like fast music, so what should I do? I changed my interface from controlling buttons to putting all the copper tape on a flat surface, so right now they’re all on the papers. The paper is very light and very easy to place it on the table, tape it down and it becomes very flat. It allows your finger to slide very smoothly. Initially I thought when your fingers can slide without like a button or a key that has the resistance of being an object that you need to go over it becomes a very fast way of hand controlling things. At the same time I realised, because it’s so flat, it’s also literally on the piece of paper, it changed my brain a little bit as that was the first performance that I did on this paper controller. I thought I was drawing! In the middle of the performance I forgot that I was performing and I thought I was drawing on paper, so I could imagine things not just looking at the lights, but also imagining the way I draw. That stimulates more musical imagination for myself and also working with the table which is a flat surface I have a wider optic feedback, so I have more control on how I touch the table without worrying if I’m hitting the wrong button. A lot of the times I work with how I hit the surface either I use the flat finger, standing finger or you use more like a staccato touch or like push it, massage it — they all really trigger different sensations in my body that turns into my musical material that I channel out.
Does the instrument only include hardware?
Arduino is part of it. It’s powered by Arduino which is a small microcontroller, like a little small computer, so unfortunately it’s not entirely analog, but I really like that the digital layer of it the way you code adds an extra layer of flexibility in your design. Also, for me as a circuit newbie, it’s a much easier way of making the instrument work.
Can you imagine the instrument without the lights?
Yeah, sure. Of course, it can be done, but do I like it? I don’t know, because I came up with this idea with the light in mind and that was the device that I chose to use for playing with lights. To me it’s a priority that I wanted to have some things to control my light and I decided to use the relay which also happens to have sound. If I wanted to just make a sound piece, I would like to have eight different sound sources. I would dig into the sonic ram to use different sounds for them, so I think it’s a matter of artistic choice, but also it deals with preferences. I guess right now I would not play it without it, I will not create an album, for example, to just have the relay sounds. But there are times when I just wanted to play with some musicians, I wanted to find things that I have in my studio, then that’s one of the things I could play, if I don’t want to play with light. There are times that the venue is too small, too cosy that I find the lights are too intense for some people. I definitely have done it when I collaborate with other musicians, but that’s not something that I would choose.
Can you imagine the instrument without the sound?
I’ve also done that, but then again I will not choose relays as my instrument. Every component is decided. Before I play with “Bulbble” I play a lot with my duo partner Nicola who plays the guitar. We actually play together, so he played guitars and electronics and me on the light and I did have two separate setups. One comes with the relays, one comes from the dimmer so that you don’t see the sound. Initially I was just very fascinated by how musical light is for me and I wanted to find a way to play with just light. Then I realised that actually I can play with sound and after that I realised that actually if I have two setups, I have one setup that has sounds and one setup that has lights so that I have the flexibility to break the connection between sound and light. Light doesn’t have to be musical with sounds, light can also be musical without sound, but there are times that it’s nice to add the sonic components so that I have the variety playing in a duo.
There are times when it’s nice to hear the rhythms instead of seeing the rhythm for me. When you perceive music from a different sensory organ it really triggers different sensations, so that’s actually my whole idea with the light. In the end I like how “Bulbble” is just very focused. It communicates the concept of the setup itself very clearly, in a very focused way and I really like that I can just bring one setup and I play it. I always like to call it one of my live projects that I do and for different light projects that I do I try to communicate different aspects of light. Once I also did a performance of just non-sounding light, just with dimmers and how to control lights without sound. It was a small performative installation kind of thing where people just come and then I start the performance without the sonic components of the light setup. I was controlling the lights with dimmers, trying to bring out different qualities from the dimmer. During the program I encouraged people to look into the light, relate the lights with their own bodies and the space and how that creates a musical experience for each of them.
What would be your suggestions to other composers that would like to build their own instruments?
Oh wow, that’s a hard one, because different people really build different things. In particular, there are quite a number of them in Berlin. There’s a composer who built a lot of massive, sculptural, kinetic instruments that make sounds, that make beautiful rhythms. There are quite some from the Fluxus from the Dada. Of course, there’s David Tudor. These days there’s Nick Collins who built quite the instruments. I just saw a performance of his the other day where he put fingers on an old circuit board to make new sounds. There are young ones that I really like the work of, for example, Merche Blasco who is a Spanish sound artist, instrument builder.
I mean, different people build things very differently. There are people who build their own machine and just play, like they make their own instrument, there are people who are makers who extend their traditional instruments and there are analog ways of doing it, there are people building controllers and extensions to help them specialise sounds in the space. There’s a group from Cologne which is also very fun. It’s a quartet of mannequin legs, so they turn mannequin legs into instruments that they can bow, they can play it like a percussion, they can blow it like a saxophone, so this approach is like you use an object that is not seen as a traditional instrument and you make it to sort of work very similarly to how um um how you play in a traditional sense. There are people like Adam Pultz Melbye who extends his double bass very beautifully. He has an instrument called “Faab” which stands for feedback-actuated augmented bass and he built pickups for his double bass and he put a speaker on the back of the double bass, so he drilled a hole and put a speaker in it. The whole thing is powered by a Bela board and that’s the sort of system that he creates so that he can play the double bass that also plays with feedback from the bass itself.
This sort of approach is an augmentation of traditional instruments in an unconventional way. There are people who are makers like Marco Donnaruma, for example. He does a lot of things, he picks up signals from his own body to create electronic music, so there are different approaches. Unfortunately, I can name all of them.
I always tell people to think big. I mean, it needs to be personal, so you have to think back, try to imagine what could happen and you gotta try. I think I learned so much just from trial and error, like I really did not start from um looking into a particular kind of instrumental making. At the time I started I didn’t know many people who make their own things. Of course, there are quite a number of people who have been doing that for a very long time, but I do think putting your hands on it and really being a good observer is necessary. In the beginning I just had one channel of relay and one light bulb. I mean, I was playing with light bulbs before, so I had all these ports and cables that I could just plug in and I had Arduino. I was like, “Well, I think I can put them together, I can program it in a way that I can make the lights flicker.” That was just that.
At the time I did very, very, very little programming, so you learn it. You ask people, you go online, you buy books, trying to learn the basics of the programming and you just have to keep remembering what you want to achieve. Once you learn it you put it back to making it work. Then you look at how it behaves and then you put your hands around it. I was like, “Okay, now I can see the light flicker, that’s great, it’s fun.” My next question was, “What if I put a knob so that I can control the speed?” In the beginning I didn’t know what it could mean when I said that, I just said, “What if?” and I decided to just try, it doesn’t hurt.
I put the potentiometer, the knob, in there in the circuit, it took me some time to learn it. Then I realised that it’s also a spectrum of a frequency that you can control and I realised that, “Oh, what if I tune it to 30 Hertz?” I would immediately hear a pitch. “What if I turn it to 40 Hertz?” Oh, I really hear the pitch. “What if I turn it to 100 Hertz?” At that point I realised that I really cannot do it, because that’s too fast. I came to the conclusion that there’s a spectrum, there is a gradation, but there’s also limitation. I started to find out, “Ah, okay, so where’s the end point? Ah, this is how fast I could do it. How slow do I want to do it?” Because you can do as slow as possible, you can have one click every year or something. The
switch set the limit of the highest point, I set the limit for the slowest point and. I spent a lot of time just turning the knob to see what sort of music I want to play, if I can play some kind of music that makes sense to me.
That was the time I realised that the one channel is very limited. It doesn’t have the complexity that I wanted. I put four together like a quartet, so basically the four channels of the same setup and then I just put my hands in play. I realised that the result was very satisfying at that time, so that’s how I started putting my instrument in four channels in the first place.
I would say be courageous and just try. I mean, a lot of these things can be done within a small voltage, so it should be within nine volts. If anything happens, it’s okay. You do things with 220 volts, if you’re in Europe and if you’re in the US, it’s 110 volts. What you do is you talk to someone who is good with it to make sure everything is safe before you do it. Other than that just literally put your hands in there and just try to see what is possible. I think to me that is the most exciting part of making an instrument. You have to find your own way. That would take a longer time, but that makes the instrument unique I would say.
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Viola Yip is a composer, performer, improviser, sound artist, and instrument builder from Hong Kong. She has been interested in creating new self-built instruments and sound works in the intersection of composition, performance, improvisation, and sound art, exploring various relationships between media, materiality, space, and our musical bodies in experimental music. Viola’s instruments and performances have been presented in major music festivals and concert series all over the world.
