The Pedalling Games is a suite of interactive sonic bike pieces made for Fordham Park to be played by passing audience. Created using a brand new system developed by the BRI and explored with workshop participants at the NIME conference, park visitors can come cycle a bike in and around the park, making music dependant on how and where they go and how near or far they move from other sonic cyclists.
Solo or grouped, the 13 sonic bikes behave differently, some as synths, some as locative sample players, but all as instruments, sonically sensitive to the presence and absence of each other as the shape and size of the group and the decisions and actions of the performing cyclists constantly shifts. Moment by moment new music will be made by the audience through cycling.
The Bicrophonic Research Institute (BRI) is an association that researches and collaborates to make and share music from bicycles by pedalling through landscapes alone or together. Through ten years of international projects, the BRI has developed the
sonic bike which plays music that changes dependant on where and how fast the cyclist goes through a pair of bike-mounted speakers and bespoke software to GPS system, the cyclist becoming the performer and the passers by audience. Established by Kaffe Matthews and Dave Griffiths in 2014, the BRI's collaborators for this piece include George Haworth and Lyubo Popomov.
Kaffe Matthews is an awarded sound artist composer who has been making new electro-acoustic music worldwide with things such as violin, theremin, sonic beds, NASA, sharks, children and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra since 1990. Acknowledged as a pioneer in the field of electronic improvisation and live composition, Kaffe has released 6 solo CD’s on the label
Annette Works, and continues to direct vibratory interface design project
music for bodies. Her 2004 collaboration
Weightless Animals was awarded a BAFTA, she received a NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship in 2005 and an Award of Distinction, Prix Ars Electronica 2006 for the work
Sonic Bed_London. In February 2006 she was made an Honorary Professor of Music, Shanghai Music Conservatory, China and in 2009, a patron of the Galapagos shark conservation society.
