After four years on a PhD researching the essence of “interactive music” as an artform, my head was filled with theories of what music is. Most prevalent was Christopher Small description of music as a playground to explore the possible social relationships between people, free from the consequences of literal reality. We shout, harmonise, clash, resonate, shout, sit quietly, dance, flirt, show off, lead, follow. The whole gamut of interpersonal dynamics is there.

Cave of Sounds was originally called Ensemble. The single word interchangeably describes a group of people, a set of instruments and the sound they make together. I imagined prelinguistic people sitting around a fire evolving music as the gateway to the dynamic web of relations and roles that makes human teamwork so formidable. From this perspective, ensemble is the fruit and the necessity of music. It is the practice of individuals becoming a single force of consciousness.

I observed that in the music hacker scene, a single individual is often instrument-creator, composer and performer. I’d see people perform together on a stage. But in this space, creating and hacking technology is a musical act in itself. So what happens if we create the instruments together? Like how we improvise together in a jam, except with the instrument-building bit. Would we end up with an ensemble to match the spectral balance of the orchestra? Would our individual musical identities still shine through in the outcome?

I put out the invitation to the community for people to join an experiment where we each build an instrument for a new ensemble. Eight got involved: Dom Aversano, Susanna Garcia, Wallace Hobbes, Daniel Lopez, Tadeo Sendon, Panagiotis Tigas, Kacper Ziemianin and myself. As we each set about building an instrument, we met every few weeks, sharing ideas, prototypes and skills. It took ten months.