left to their own devices is a triptych of pieces in which a small gadget generates sound and movement. The device is activated by an audience, a dancer, or participant in an installation or performance. Built from hardware such as accelerometers, stepper motors, and muscle stimulators, each contraption is a nexus of sensing and feedback. The pieces build on Nick’s experience as an instrument builder and research of musical automata, as well as creator of works that compose themselves on the spot, through bespoke generative software.
Extant, is an immersive sonic installation about mechanisms for navigation—based on my grandfather’s sextant, which he used to disappear to Tahiti (I never met him). I’m using modern technologies (mini-gyros, arduinos and surround sound) and connecting them to older ways of navigation (the sextant) to make an audience see, touch, and learn these devices. In the last years, I’ve learned to celestially navigate, poring over my grandfather’s charts and lists of transits of Venus and the sun. I see this hand-me-down as a way to find him.
The sextant is based on imprecise science--it relies on where you thought you were yesterday, on the high seas, to predict your current position. Extant reflects on “absence-of-field” effects— classic psychoacoustic experiments, such as Shepard tones and rhythm--acoustical barber poles--that are based on how fast they travel, not where they are, and they get lost over time. Amidst this sonic disorientation, the participant tries to orient themself against programmed odds, to autolocate while sounds swirl adrift around them.
Drafts of Extant have been installed at Coffey Street Studio and Bennington College. Sound design has been done as part of residency at Marble House Project and an upcoming residency at the Visby center on Götland island.
Hypnagogia is a transitional state between sleep and wakefulness, in which people experience sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and tics. Hypnagogia will be developed as a collaboration between Meret Schlegel and Nick Brooke at the Tanzhaus Zürich in June 2025. Both Meret and Nick have hypnagogia, where sudden “sleep starts”, or bursts of energy through a limb, push one back into a waking state.
The piece explores the tension between immobility and hyperactivity, and the sounds are generated on the spot. Alternating high and low tones are filtered and processed to become echoes of each other. The generative music is affected by accelerometers strapped to the mover’s body. In turn, electric stimulants create involuntary muscle contractions or twitches during the installation. These tics are unpredictable, wirelessly generated by the sounds themselves, and are part of the improvisatory vocabulary—a borderline between intentional and unexpected, sleep and wakefulness.
A version of Hypnagogia was installed at Bennington College in Fall 2024.
Barrel Roll refers to the spiral and torque of a barrel, such as a mechanical cylinder on a player piano, or the downward careening of a biplane.
The piece is a tiny, self-contained device, made out of a yoga block, a music box, and motors. I will give this device freely to multiple choreographers to generate their own music. Playing with the topos of music box and toy ballerina, the tiny mechanism is exploded out through contact mikes, stepper motors, and motion sensors to create a generative, interactive piece that transcends the toy. Inverting the trope, the dancer’s movement literally turns the barrel and creates the sound, which is processed and, in turn, gyrates the dancer and sound design. All the programming, and generative sound is housed within the small portable mechanism.
Barrel roll is in development as of Fall 2025.