Time Loops | Science Museum Group

Time Loops addresses the conundrum that museums face in collecting and exhibiting objects for making sound and music. Protected behind thick glass, gloved handled with extreme care, they become mute, their voices left to the imagination. Placed alongside their peers, so to speak, they enter narratives of evolution-like progress, where ‘generations’ of technologies are sequenced through their visual differences towards ever greater refinement.

Approached through touch and hearing, however, objects reveal themselves in very different ways. They sing, growl, buzz, and swoop. When musicians play them, they are not only controlled—doing what they are instructed—but to the inclined ear and sensitive handling they often provide unexpected qualities.

Music does not ‘advance’ in the same ways as technologies and science. As we have found with Time Loops, analogue electronic instruments have similar individual qualities that are fascinating to play with and learn from, and that continue to offer musical potential decades after their digital successors supposedly made them redundant.

Three new works for Time Loops, composed by Sarah Angliss, Gavin Bryars, and Shiva Feshareki, and devised with the musical ensemble Icebreaker, put the spotlight on particular instruments in the Science Museum collections. These include the Watkins Copicat, a cheap, portable tape delay first created by engineer Charlie Watkins in 1958. In Angliss’ piece, the Copicat is an agent of chaos in a musical exploration of the tangled web of influences in rock-and-roll postwar Britain that brought it into being.

Two ShoZygs (built by James Bulley, Ian Stonehouse and Jake Tyler) and assorted accessories.

Bryars will present a ‘Concerto Grosso for ShoZygs’, a piece inspired by his own experimental and improvisatory practice in the 1960s and early ‘70s. The ShoZygs were home-made instruments created by concrètiste Hugh Davies, which featured electro-acoustic devices installed within the covers of encyclopaedia volumes. A series of four new units, produced for the project by makers Ian Stonehouse, James Bulley and Jake Tyler will fea ture alongside tape loops, reel-to-reel machines, and the VCS3 and VCS4 analogue synthesisers.

Professor Steve Thomas manipulates the VCS3 at Wysing Arts Centre.

The VCS3 was one of the first portable analogue synthesizers when it was first launched in 1970 by the Putney synthesizer company Electronic Music Studios, and soon became popular alternative to the large modular units of Moog and Buchla amongst musicians.

The VCS4, a one-off unit that was never commercialised, comprises two conjoined VCS3 modules and an added keyboard. A working model of the VCS3 has been loaned for this project by Steve Thomas of Digitana Electronics. Goldsmiths Electronic Music Studios has loaned its singular VCS4.

Alongside more traditional instruments running through Roland Space Echo units, these synthesizers will contribute to the subtly-evolving timbral variations of Feshareki, whose use of sound design will explore the spatial possibilities in blurring the boundary between performance and exhibit.

With the subtle handling and inclined ears of the Icebreaker musicians in play, the union of musician and technologies promises a more lively and revealing form of sonic display than is possible in traditional museum practice.

Left to right: Guy Passey, Prof Steve Thomas & Rowland Sutherland manipulate the VCS4 at Wysing Arts Centre

This project follows on from the AHRC-funded Music, Noise and Silence: Defining Relationships between Science and Music in Modernity (MNS), which examined music and sound in relation to science and technology within the context of sonic and industrial modernity. It also brought together musicians, curators and scholars to imagine how science museums might most effectively conceive an exhibition on sound and music, and raised the possibility of supplementing systems of display with forms of performance and participation. It is this latter aspect and its potential to engage different audiences that we are pursuing through this follow-on project.

Aims

1: Producing a museum-concert as ‘a combination of event programme and display’

2: Using creative processes to reveal the interplay of instrumental affordances and music

3: Fostering knowledge exchange and sharing of MNS’s research through public advocacy

4: Developing and sharing research-informed learning resources

Outputs

A museum-concert: The museum-concert presents the three works by Angliss, Bryars and Feshareki in the Information Age gallery at the Science Museum in London on 6 February 2025, and at the Science and Media Museum in Bradford on 15 March 2025, inviting audiences to explore a temporary exhibition—in the form of a 70’ performance—that gives new importance to listening. In this live experiment, working music machines, including the musicians’ own acoustic instruments, will be exhibited in the gallery for you to view as three new pieces unfold.
A radio story: Created by Niamh and Aisling Gallagher, to be broadcast on Resonance FM on 9 January.
A podcast episode of Girls Twiddling Knobs: Podcaster and educator Isobel Anderson has been documenting the workshopping process for Time Loops with a special focus on the women involved.
A teaching pack: For Key Stage 3, devised by Dr Kirsty Devaney and supported by a workshop with Shiva Feshareki held with Carlton Bolling Academy, part of the Carlton Academy Trust.

Project Team

Core Team

Principal Investigator: Dr Ed McKeon; Co-Investigator: Prof James Mansell
Project personnel: Dr Tim Boon, Dr Annie Jamieson, Cathy Lucas
Composers: Sarah Angliss, Prof Gavin Bryars, & Dr Shiva Feshareki
Musical Ensemble: Icebreaker (Dr Audrey Riley, Music Director; James Poke, Artistic Director)
Sound Design: Asa Bennett
Lighting Design: Michael Mannion
Performance Advisor: Athina Valha
Documentation: Daniel Lucas