The concept behind Sky Orchestra was inspired by a research trip to Tunisia in 2002. I was staying in a small town called Douz, on the edge of the Sahara desert, when early one the morning my sleep was disturbed by the calling of minarets from different quarters of the town – first one, then another, and another.
As the sound echoed throughout the empty sand-filled streets, layers of sound became visible. A perceptual map of the town seemed to open up in my head. This experience gave me the idea to make a piece of sculptural work that would be located on the edge of people’s sleep.
Later that year I met Dan Jones, a composer living on the same street as me in Bristol. An important question that remained was how to deliver this especially composed sleep music? Bumping into a hot air balloon pilot in 2003, the idea for Sky Orchestra was firmed.
Using an array of hot air balloons with speakers attached, the idea was to deliver an artistic experience to the public in their own homes. Each balloon was to play a different part of the musical score creating an audio landscape spanning right across the city. By launching at dawn we could lift the public into a perceptual space on the edge of sleep and inspire their imaginations.
Our first performance in 2003 was a fiasco. With no funding everything was reliant on sponsorship. There were logos on everything. It was too foggy to fly so we did a ‘tethered launch’ reaching a dizzy 10m from the ground. It was a media frenzy and the event was covered by national BBC television that filmed the event as though it did actually happen. It made quite a news story. They edited in old film footage of balloons flying over Bristol from the 1980s with staged video of local housewives twitching net curtains and a pet dog looking up at the sky.
We finally performed later that same year and documented the event with four cameras videoing the event from the ground and the air. A documentary film of this first flight is on the Sky Orchestra web page.
The music is designed not to wake people up but to be experienced in the curious perceptual space on the edge of sleep. We hope to promote creative engagement in this vast internal space by triggering visual imagery within viewers imaginations. So although the performance is quite spectacular, it’s designed to deliver an intimate, personal experience to people in their homes.
What we commonly find though is that many people are woken by the music and, still in their pyjamas, excitedly run out of the house. In Birmingham a man ran out of the house in just a wet towel, straight out of the shower. A BBC film crew asked him to do it again for the camera, but he’d locked himself out of the house. It was all quite embarrassing.
I do hope some people experience Sky Orchestra though, in the way it’s intended.
The composition has been arranged so specific motifs are passed from one balloon to another. The effect is quite beautiful. It’s like whales calling in the ocean; the same sounds can be heard in succession passing from one balloon to another across the sky.
After the performance in Bristol we delivered flyers to people’s homes and got all sorts of interesting responses. We’ve made some changes to the format and timing of the work as a result of this feedback. You can read about them on our web page.
While investigating the affects of sound upon sleep, I discovered the scientifically described phenomenon of ‘incorporation’. If someone is in REM or dreaming stage of sleep, any sound or external stimulus in the room can affect their dreaming content. For example, if you play the sound of a seagull calling, people end up dreaming about being by the sea.
To investigate the affects of Sky Orchestra music I’ve collected a team of scientists and have held a number of sleepover events called Dream Concerts. Over 100 people cram into a big room to sleep and during the night we play sound samples to see if there is any affect on their dreams. Participants write down their dreams in the morning, which are then analysed and compared to normative values.
What we’ve found is that many people do incorporate the sounds, but they also dream about being in a big experiment with 100 other people! We also know that 65% of all normal dreams are anxiety based. Surprisingly in our studies we found that our dream concerts dramatically reduce the percentage of anxiety based dreams. But what function do anxiety based dreams have in our lives and what effect might changing this percentage have?
Through an Arts and Science Research fellowship at the University of West of England, we’ve taken the research further by building a ‘Dream Director’ to scientifically test for ‘incorporation’ of sound. The machine measures heart rate to locate REM dreaming and delivers a sound sample at exactly the right time. Results have so far been promising. We hope the Dream Director will have clinical applications for people suffering from trauma who commonly experience reoccurring nightmares. It may be that we can alter the direction of a nightmare as its occurring. We wonder what affect this might have on recovery rates for patients.
In 2006 Sky Orchestra was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company to perform for the Complete Works Festival. We flew over Stratford-upon-Avon one mid-summers morn with Shakespearian text recited by Patrick Stewart and Janet Suzman. The affect of whispering voices coming out of the sky was quite surreal, but also pretty magical.
The performance made national news and our BBC television coverage was exported to America through ABC news. I’ve since received some really odd emails from people in Texas!
We were also invited to the Sydney Festival. We’re looking forward to finding out what the public makes of Sky Orchestra. Sydney Festival have set up a special webpage to log people’s emails. You can access it at: http://sydneyfestivalblog.com
…sweet dreams
Sky Orchestra Team
The members of the Sky Orchestra team include composer Dan Jones, project manager Rachel Drummond Haye, UK Lead pilot Peter Dalby, and Sleep Scientists Chris Alford and Jennie Parker of UWE. I work as the Artistic Director of the team.
