To Find Rhythm One Must Go Back to Nature by Nicolás Kisic Aguirre

Working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general and Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, in particular, can render unexpected bits of wisdom in the form of thoughtful, even mystic phrases from time to time. Some months ago, the NLP model I was working with declared “To find rhythm one must go back to nature.” I had fine-tuned a GPT-2 model to a corpus composed of four books: Ritmo, el eterno organizador (in English, Rhythm, the Eternal Organizer), by Victoria Santa Cruz; The Mysticism of Sound and Music, by Inayat Khan; Sonic Warfare, by Steve Goodman; and Techgnosis, by Erik Davis. Other phrases, which I compiled into an AI’s Rhythm Manifesto, were similarly axiomatic, like “rhythm is the mother of all inventions.” Or “without rhythm we have noise.”

I have to admit—I have an obsession with rhythm, and I don’t mean the abstract concept of rhythm, I mean the type of rhythm that is mostly produced by percussion. Reading about it in The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media, and the Sonic, a book by Eleni Ikoniadou, I found myself trapped by these words about rhythm that resonated strongly. Ikoniadou quoted Daniel Levitin, who said “[…] (rhythm) is a crucial part of what turns sound into music.” I’ve wondered before where the line that separates sound from music is, and while I don’t believe unequivocally that the answer is rhythm, I still think it stands as a beautiful and powerful thought. And so where, and how, can we find rhythm in nature?

I found myself prompted by the NLP model the same way we attempt to prompt NLP models to elaborate on certain topics or phrases. As if it was a game, I accepted the challenge and thought of imagining devices that could reveal (acoustic) rhythmic patterns in nature. I remembered Pablo Saavedra’s ‘Pluviófono’ and similar experiments with rain in Valparaíso, Chile:

Pluviófono, by Pablo Saavedra Arévalo (2020).

I wondered what would it be like to be immersed in a minimal architecture composed of a similar strategy, adding to it the potential to use cans as a building material. By these thoughts, I am reminded of the sound of rain hitting the roof of a house and the uniqueness of each house in reproducing the sound of rain as their geographical and material properties interact. I thought of employing a similar strategy I utilized for a past project I created called Momoprot:

Momoprot (2020) https://nka.radio/momoprot.

With the Momoprot, I had joined paint buckets side-to-side to create an angled surface. Mounted on a rescued shopping cart, the Momoprot was made to travel alongside protesters in Valparaíso, Chile, offering them a surface to discharge in percussion while collectively joining in rhythm.

This time, I want to re-utilize food cans instead of paint buckets both as percussion instruments and as a construction material. The reduction in scale seems appropriate when I think of the differences between an energized protester hitting a paint bucket with a stick and a tiny drop of water falling onto the surface of a can. Indeed, the food cans seem better suited, as Saavedra has made evident in his work when interacting with rain.

Like with the Momoprot, the idea of making a percussion system portable feels imperative, so as to explore different circumstances, specifically geographies, that could eventually turn into an artistic study of the rhythm of rainfall. It feels right to aim at constructing a system that can be inhabited and worn and the same time, an architecture similar to the house of a Hermit Crab. In a way I wonder, if we were all hermit crabs, what would our houses sound like when interacting with rain?