Photo by Nick Rutter.

On April 20th, at St. John's Smith Square, I'll be performing my piece Us Alone on Sound Icon, with Ben Smith (also on Sound Icon) and Zoe Martlew (on cello). We'll also be performing Horatiu Radulescu's remarkable Intimate Rituals, a piece to which my work is greatly indebted, and some improvisations in which we experiment with the Sound Icons in unusual ways. 

A 'Sound Icon' is a grand piano turned on its side, stripped of its innards and bowed using nylon. You can see one on the right; the nylon threads have to pinned all around the frame with coloured electrical tape so you don't lose their whispy ends. They produce a remarkable, sitar-like sound, punctuated with an occasional 'ping', as the nylon threads snap under the pressure of playing. There's a little, low-quality video of me doing this below.

Both Radulescu's piece and mine use the harmonic series as a starting point for harmony. The harmonic series is the collection of notes that arise when you cut a string in half, doubling the frequency each time. These notes arise naturally in all musical sound, but are quite different from the tuning system we typically use.