Rūta Vitkauskaitė

‘Aronia Overture’ is a trans-disciplinary collaboration between composer Rūta Vitkauskaitė artists-researcher Bartaku and electronic instrument-maker Karl Heinz-Jeron. A project which aims to express the essence of the Aronia Melanocarpa berry through the medium of music, with the process being a complex and collective synaesthetic experience.

The Aronia Melanocarpa was once popularly planted across the Soviet Union, but has since been abandoned, with old plantations now in a state of neglect. However, the artists see the berry’s potential for global recognition as a premium power plant for both the body and the electricity generation.

The berry and its qualities – visual, chemical structure, scientific observations, and history – became the inspirations for their unfolding collaboration. Since one of its chemical structures (an acid) is a very effective conductor of electricity it became the basis for Karl’s electronic music instrument ‘The Octopus Machine’. The berry’s taste and astringency (throat shrinking) qualities were the inspiration for Rūta’s work ‘The Aronia Unchoir’ – the shrinking throat choir, where choir members are asked to embody non-human qualities, and explore their throats through a specially designed workshop.

The artists experimented with various sonic expressions of the berry, both real and imaginary, including singing with the effects of drinking Aronia juice, producing sounds in low and high registers with a sore throat, and sounding while wrapped in a damp plastic bag to emulate the experience of being inside the berry. While some of these experiments did not project well in a concert setting, the audience was invited to watch the artists go through the process of discovering the “Aronia sound”, to perceive with greater accuracy.

‘The Dripping Aronia Machine’, later renamed ‘The Octopus Machine’, was created by Karl Heinz Jeron. It utilizes both contact and non-contact methods to measure the electric fields and internal processes of plants. ‘The Octopus Machine’ produces an orchestrated, aleatoric audio piece based on a number of unspecified processes within the berries. The installation is enhanced with a keyboard/sensor (similar to a theremin) that can be played by a musician. The idea was to have two layers: one for playing tuned tones and another one for generating random tones. The random tone layer can either be applied to the tuned tone layer manually, based on a musical score, or played autonomously.

The sound, colour, and volume of the output are varied based on the internal electro-chemical state of the Aronia berries, resulting in an improvised piece of music created from the electronic components connected to the berries. The ultimate goal was to increase the possibilities for articulating variations in noise and develop the musical-acoustic qualities of plants for a concert performance.