Appendix B:
Transcript of Interview with Sam Underwood, recorded via MS Teams on 5 March 2024
LR: Lauren Redhead
SU: Sam Underwood
LR:
OK, so, well, I can... I'll just ask you these questions and, I mean, they are quite broad and general because I'm interested in you saying what you think, and then I will...
SU:
...Yeah.
LR:
...find the bits that are most relevant to what I want to say, and obviously I will share with you the final thing when it’s done before it ends up on the journal site. So that, yeah.
SU:
Right, yeah.
LR:
OK. So, actually, if you could just start by introducing yourself. Just say, like, you know, "I’m Sam Underwood and I do this." That would be great.
SU:
Hi, I'm Sam Underwood and I build predominantly mechanical musical instruments, that are mostly intended to be self-running, but also have human players.
LR:
Perfect. Excellent. Thank you. OK, so can you just start off by describing your practice of building those instruments?
SU:
Yes. I come at my work from a very experimental standpoint, both in terms of what the musical outcomes are, but also very much in terms of the process of building instruments. So, I have a studio and workshop in which I'm able to fabricate prototype instruments based on some thinking around what I’d like the instrument to do, and then it’s just a very slow and iterative process of building a prototype, testing it, finding out what works and what doesn't work, and then developing another prototype. That sort of stepwise process is how I tend to arrive at a final instrument design.
There’s often also playing in between as well, so that I’m encountering it as an instrument that one would use, rather than just in technical terms. So I'll spend quite a lot of time taking an instrument, trying it out, seeing what affordances it has or what ways it does what I want or anticipate, and often I go down a total tangent because it does something else much more interesting than I had anticipated, or that is just totally different from what I planned. And then in many cases, that leads to a totally different design, either a branch of the initial instrument design, or I might even abandon the initial instrument idea in favor of the new thing that I've found.
LR:
OK. Interesting. And so what is most important to you? Is it in terms of, like, the sound or the design or the function? Or like, what do you prioritize when you're making those?
SU:
Yeah, it’s interesting, the distinction between when I’m making instruments for myself and when I’m making them to commission, because inevitably, when it’s a commission, somebody wants it to do something and to be played in a certain way, and so on. That has less of an open exploration phase to it, generally. But mechanical instruments are always... I mean, when they’re new and experimental mechanical musical instruments, which are what people would tend to come to me for — and as I don’t have any formal training in mechanics or instrument building, so all of this comes from trial and error and learning and, you know, years of building things — there will always be lots of technical issues that need to be solved for any instrument I might build.
But I think the bit that I really like is when I’m building instruments for my own use and for use with collaborators, where I’m able to really get lost in the tiniest details of the acoustic sounding of a surface or a cavity or whatever it is. I have a certain sense, from a long time of doing it, of what is interesting to me sonically and what is interesting to me as a player. So if I can come up with designs that encapsulate both some interesting sounds but also an ability to manipulate those in real time, especially if there’s a visual element to how someone plays it — so it’s not all tucked away so no one can see what’s going on — because I do like that tying in with my instruments — yeah, that’s a really rich, fertile kind of exploration ground for my work, and it’s where I prefer to work if I can.
LR:
Fantastic. So, when you've gone through that process, how much is indeterminacy actually a part of how the instruments work, and if it is, how do you kind of work with that?
SU:
Yeah. Indeterminacy definitely is core to a lot. I’m very open to it as an aspect of my instruments. I mean, it might sound a bit lazy maybe, but it is actually much easier to build instruments where you don’t want them to always create the same tone. You don’t worry too much about Western tuning systems, etcetera. You’re just more open to broader kinds of sounds and outcomes. Probably the area where that is most prominent — although it’s true of any acoustic instrument, like with a reed you can get all sorts of unintended sounds — is in feedback instruments.
I make a lot of instruments where the physical resonance of, say, a sheet or any kind of structure is what gives the feedback tone. Minor, really tiny alterations to the loading on that surface, for example, can change the pitch, and also change how it goes off — how loud it is and what sort of timbre it produces and all of those sorts of things. They are beyond my control. I can exert a certain amount of control, and you can learn what constraints result broadly in what outcomes, but the idea that you could go back to an instrument like that and produce a series of repeatable pitches reliably — that’s not an option. So I’m very comfortable, in almost all of the instruments that I’ve built for my own use over the last 15 years or so, having a large area of uncontrollability, essentially.
LR:
So can you describe to me an example of... is there one instrument that you have made that you feel really encapsulates what your practice is about? Or does so the most?
SU:
Yes, although I would say that I’m always learning what I feel my practice is about. It’s interesting — I’ve produced some instruments in the past where every instrument has its idiosyncrasies. It’s probably worth mentioning that my instruments tend not to be a single instrument; they’re more a multi-instrument system. They tend to be modular. Different modules have strengths and weaknesses and roles within the wider instrument system. Two very obvious examples for me are the Mammoth Beat Organ, a large, self-propelling musical machine that Graham Dunning and I built that has both of us as players of this instrument in real time. It’s somewhat like an opened-up fairground organ, where all of the insides — including the pipes themselves, or the sequences that are playing — can be manipulated in real time, rather than just feeding a roll of paper in and getting it to faithfully reproduce some music.
That instrument has actually spawned my latest instrument, which is called ams. Graham and I both come from a live improv setting, and we play in that setting in other projects quite often. The Mammoth Beat Organ is simultaneously really great and really rubbish at different things. It’s almost incapable of impulsive changes — really radical changes in either volume or timbre. It’s very difficult to go from something super quiet to super loud really fast, because it all has to get up to speed. It’s a big, lumbering beast of a machine. On the other hand, it will do rhythmic, bounceable kind of music quite effectively, and it just plays relentlessly no matter what you do; it just continues having a pulse all the way. But it won’t do certain quick changes.
So ams is a response to that — my acoustic modular system, essentially an acoustic modular synth. It doesn’t follow the Eurorack format because acoustic instruments benefit from a larger size, but it follows the Moog size of modules. You plug in leads the same way you would with a modular synth. You activate it over CV and gate, but all the sounds and the ways it manipulates sounds are acoustic. ams was built in response to the Mammoth Beat Organ because, first, it’s smaller and easier to take places — a very practical reason — and second, it’s absolutely capable of rapid sound changes.
It’s part of the learning process: live, Graham and I found frustrations with the Mammoth Beat Organ, and I thought, OK, how can I design a system that responds to those issues? ams has its own issues — it’s very quiet, for example, whereas the Mammoth Beat Organ can fill a space acoustically. But ams is a deep listening experience: the audience has to come in and really join you on that journey. It’s much smaller, it’s all acoustic, and it’s about that kind of quiet micro-sound, really. Yeah. So I guess those two are definitely the instruments I consider my greatest achievements as an instrument maker — but they have very different affordances.
LR:
Wonderful. Thank you. That's brilliant. OK, so then the only other thing that I wanted to ask is: is there anything else that you think is really important to say about your work that you haven’t said?
SU:
Yes, one thing. I think that... I mean, we know each other — I guess maybe the first time was through Twitter, but I’m not quite sure — but I think that’s probably where we first encountered each other. And I used to use Twitter to post work-in-progress builds of my instruments. I did that mainly because, well, for two reasons. One is because sometimes people would have very useful responses to them, and it was also a way of gauging whether other people found certain aspects interesting over others. But also because I’m very keen on it as a process for people who want to create experimental music, really.
I think being willing to go beyond the instruments that we have — by either adapting or building from scratch your own instruments — is a fantastic shortcut to arriving at new sounds and new ways of working with sound. And for me, especially with acoustic instruments — I’ve built synths and stuff in the past, and the problem I find with that is that, well, I guess partially I fell off the end of what I knew, because I don’t have a background formally in any of these things. I don’t have a background in electronics. So I would know what I wanted my synths to do, but I didn't know how to make that happen.
With acoustic sound, especially once you’ve spent some time learning and understanding how different things affect stuff, it’s much more immediate and hands-on. It’s kind of quite obvious that if you’ve got a vibrating surface and you scatter a load of rice all over the top of it, it’s going to sizzle. And if it’s a sizzly sound that you want at the time, that’s a really quick and effective way to work. So really the thing I’d say is that just building even quite rudimentary acoustic instruments is a fantastic way to extend the sounds at your disposal and the ways of engaging with those.
LR:
Lovely. Thank you.
SU:
Yeah.
LR:
That’s great. I don't have anything else to ask you, and that’s absolutely loads there. So I have now lots of, yeah, transcribing and work to do, but that’s so... yeah, thank you so much.