I am the Ball

A football sound machine

I built an instrument for a one-off performance with Matthew Herbert and Ensemble Resonanz called The Game. We performed music in response to a live football game in Hamburg. The game was being played just down the road and the concert hall was full of football fans. The broadcast stream was on a big screen in the hall, creating a pretty special atmosphere.

My instrument was made out of a gametrak and a custom built wooden frame with a miniature replica football field. A ball was attached to the end of the gametrak string. Pulling the ball down towards the field generated sound, which would change based on the location of the ball in three dimensional space around the field. It was…kind of silly and bonkers and fun.

I wrote a paper about this project for Audio Mostly 2025. You can read the paper here.