The story of the Ceramophone

At the centre of it all, an original musical instrument, the Ceramophone. Designed by Simon Astridge and James Mason and built by Jerry Fleming, the Ceramophone is a circular percussion instrument for multiple players made from porcelain ceramic tiles tuned to the pentatonic scale. In this article, the creative collaborators reveal their roles in the story of the Ceramophone: the conversation that started the ball rolling, the research and design stage, the challenges of the build, the impact of the musical instrument, and its ongoing life. Louise Glück wrote in the poem Celestial Music, “The love of form is a love of endings”, yet this form has engendered countless beginnings. 

One thing I love about my job is the freedom to be spontaneously creative in meetings, conversations, or even chance encounters. Something special happens when I have the freedom to collaborate creatively with others. 

One person with whom I enjoy a fruitful creative and collaborative relationship is Simon Astridge. It’s a chemistry, it’s trust, the freedom to be completely open - I love the way he receives creative opportunities.  

The Ceramophone emerged as an idea during a conversation we had at the Coach and Horses pub in Kingston. We were discussing how architecture should engage all the human senses when, in a moment of clarity, I said, “You’ve got it! Let’s use sound as a medium for an exhibition.”  

We went on to talk about sound and surface, soundwaves in space, interactions between sound and materials, and how sound collaborates with surfaces to make space. At some point we had it – a combination of themes and ideas about sound and space grouped around the concept of collaboration. I hazily remember skipping down the road after closing time.  

We approached Mirage, one of Italy’s largest porcelain factories and one of our core partners, and pitched our idea, and the way to make it happen – collaboration. 

Sam and I are fascinated by the multi-sensory experience of architecture. My praxis has been strongly influenced by the Finnish Architect and educator Juhani Pallasmaa, who argues in his influential book, ‘Eyes of the Skin’, that architecture often overemphasises the visual at the expense of the other sensory modalities.  

We asked ourselves, how does sound behave in different spaces? What impact does sound have upon our physical and emotional wellbeing? How does sound influence our behaviour? It is quite clear that architecture shapes sound; shouldn’t sound shape architecture?  

Mirage is a major Italian ceramic producer that we wanted to work with on Sounds of the Earth. A mirage is a type of reflection of light. Tiles are reflective surfaces of both light and sound. As we bounced ideas around with Mirage, it became clear that the purpose of this installation was to initiate conversations and explore the relationships between sound, space, and ceramic.  

I learned that stone percussion instruments, or lithophones, are some of the oldest musical instruments (litho=stone). Xylophones and marimba are made from wood (xylo=wood), and glockenspiels and vibraphones use metal. Our idiophone (an instrument which creates sound through the vibration of itself) would use ceramic porcelain tiles, so we chose the name Ceramophone 

Our mutual friend James Mason, a Music Producer, had already been exploring the sounds of ceramic materials during a previous event and installation at Solus. He was the obvious choice to bring into the design process. James connected us to Jerry Fleming, a shipwright and musician, and we began the truly collaborative process of design in earnest.  

There were a few core ideas that I wanted to express through the design of the Ceramophone. The number five was important, as it was Mirage’s 50th anniversary. I wanted the instrument to be playable by multiple people, to emphasise the power of collaboration. I wanted a link between the aural and visual. The sound had to be made from ceramic tiles, tiles made exclusively from the minerals of the Earth.  

Early in the design process, we discussed what would happen to the Ceramophone after Sounds of the Earth. As companies, Solus and Mirage value inclusivity, social impact, and re-use. Happily, we were able to accommodate this with our post-event plan.  

Working with James and Jerry was a fascinating experience. To achieve the core design ideas, we overcame a lot of challenges. Although Jerry has made instruments before, none of us had ever created a completely new instrument, so we were learning on the job. I would often get a call from Jerry saying things like, ‘The G4 note has changed by 1mm to make it sound better, so we need to update the drawing for laser cutting’.  

It was seat of the pants stuff, but we delivered the Ceramophone from Jerry’s workshop in Lyme Regis to the Clerkenwell showroom in time for the Sounds of the Earth launch event. The response has been incredible. 

The Ceramophone was a challenging project; it's an unconventional chromatic percussion instrument, in that its bars are made of porcelain and trapezoid shaped to suit the horseshoe frame. The frame required precise steam-bent oak to follow the outer perimeter of the bars.  

Traditionally, tuned bars of a chromatic percussion instrument are made from metal or hardwood; both are forgiving when cutting and shaping. Although the acoustic quality of the Mirage tiles was very good, ceramic is a brittle material to use in this context.  

Unlike strings and pipes, halving the bar length increases the pitch (roughly by two octaves). This led to some tricky decisions when choosing the Ceramophone’s register. As we had decided on a pentatonic scale (five notes per octave, a nod to Mirage’s 50 years in business), there was a risk that we would quickly reduce the size (and therefore pitch) of the bars through the scale from 500mm to 50mm, rendering a 2m instrument slightly absurd.  

Although a high-quality product, tiles are not generally quality controlled for their acoustic properties. There were slight variations in sound, even with identically cut tiles. There was a final process of pitch adjustment by hollowing out the underside of the bars or adjusting the length of the bar with an angle grinder and checking with an electronic tuner. Though it sounds aggressive, with care these processes would allow pitch adjustment to the cent (100 cents in a semitone - 12 semitones in one octave).  

We wanted to make an instrument using ceramics which encouraged collaboration. The concept of people gathering and making music around a fire was inspiring to us. This is why we created a circular instrument. Simon had clear goals for the instrument in terms of how it might look and perform. I wanted to make an instrument that didn’t require people to have musical training to play it. This is why it was designed with the pentatonic scale. so that all the notes work harmonically together.  

The Ceramophone arrived in Clerkenwell the week before the first event. SE Electronics, who collaborated with us, provided microphones and we spent a lot of time trying the microphones in different positions, to see how to best place them. We also built a temporary recording studio next to the Ceramophone, to allow us to record the extraordinary collection of people who graciously agreed to be part of this unusual project.

The 12 weeks of events were a huge success, but a lot of work!  

Gosia Kepa and Connor Chambers are incredible percussionists from the Royal College of Music. When I first heard them playing the Ceramophone, I fully realised what we had made. They unlocked the music inside the instrument in a way that I can only describe as transcendent. On the first night of Sounds of the Earth they played a partially improvised piece, to a packed room of garrulous architects, designers, and contractors. You could have heard a pin drop.  

As its all-too-brief three-month residency as the belle of the Sounds of the Earth ball drew to a close, the Ceramophone had inspired countless conversations, several original compositions, academic research, and a whole lot of joy. Visitors had played it; guests had performed with it; it had become the talking point in the Clerkenwell design community.

But before the Ceramophone retired to the country to work with kids, it achieved its crowning glory by being invited to the Dezeen Awards. Gosia and Connor relived their Sounds of the Earth triumph on a bigger stage to a room full of design aficionados in Shoreditch.

Then, with some dampness around the eyes, we said goodbye as the Ceramophone left for Surrey, to Undershaw Special Educational Needs and Disabilities School. 

The arrival of the Ceramophone was an exciting event for the children. Bringing this large object into the building was a real team effort and it set the tone for how we’ve been interacting with it. The kids who brought it in were swarming around the Ceramophone and, unlike a guitar or a trombone, they were all able get onto the instrument straight away. Because of its tuning to the pentatonic scale, whatever they were playing had harmony. This is something we’ve explored together – finding common tonalities for improvisations. Immediately, they could improvise together and create something that sounded powerful and good.

That’s a huge part of what our school is about – cooperation, creativity, teamwork. This instrument facilitates this collective activity, and so it was much loved from the second it arrived. Undershaw is quite a unique school, it caters to children with special educational needs, some of whom have come from mainstream settings where the school environment was too big, too noisy for them. Our class sizes are small, usually no bigger than eight with a teacher and a teaching assistant working together. This offers an opportunity for whole group working which is more difficult in mainstream settings.

As the music teacher, I’ve done a lot of work around forming bands with the students, playing together, improvising together, creating together. The joy of the Ceramophone is that you can have a class of six students and all of them can be involved. With a class of eight, you can have some working on drums playing along with the instrument. This has a therapeutic benefit for the kids because the instrument sounds so pleasant and is calming.

It teaches them early on that the harder they hit it, the worse the sound is. It resonates best when hit lightly. That teaches them a very valuable lesson in terms of music and encourages them to listen to each other – a critical skill for any musician. 

The students were unclear on the name of the instrument initially and quite quickly they thought it would be a good idea to name it. The founder of this school lives nearby in a place called Sundial House and he very generously gives up his grounds for an annual festival that we hold called the Sundial Festival.

When the students saw the instrument, they called it ‘The Moondial’. Obviously, that’s to do with the shade of the ceramic, the crescent shape, and, I think, the calming sound of the instrument, there is something moon-like about it.

The instrument is a kind of portal that puts the children in contact with a primordial means of making music. Communally hitting objects to create sound and harmony feels like a defining human activity. A lot of the music being made nowadays involves music technology, which, while fantastic, can be a bit isolating. ‘The Moondial’ reconnects the children to a collective act of music making that teaches them valuable life skills. 

So ends our part in the story of the Ceramophone, or rather th Moondial, as it has become. A new chapter has begun and who knows what beginnings it will engender at Undershaw.

It was a story about the collective act of music making, of making a musical instrument, of gathering people to play it. It is an example of how collaboration reveals not only the best parts of
ourselves, but also achieves something greater than the sum of those parts. A mysterious gestalt effect, a creative quickening, as though the space in which we collaborate fills with something that is not wholly of us.

Ideas reflected, like sound or light, changed, amplified, sharpened, and improved. It brings us back to the first architecture, a dome of light thrown by a campfire, with warmly lit faces sharing stories, song, laughter, food, and music, reminding us that it is not competition that ensures survival, but rather collaboration.