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Finally, a Theremin for Rats

Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura

A rat explores his new creative potential.
A rat explores his new creative potential.

Experimental Baltimore musician Dan Deacon thrives on audience participation: at live shows, he plays right down on the floor with his listeners. So when the filmmaker Theo Anthony asked Deacon to get even closer to the ground, he didn’t really have to think twice.

“[Theo] posed the question: Can you make music with rats?” Deacon recalls. “I had never made music with any other species. It was an interesting question. And I didn’t want to say no, because it seemed cool.”

Anthony was working on what would become Rat Film, a feature-length meditation on the history of racial segregation in Baltimore. In the movie, rats provide a lens through which to see the city, inspiring conversations about everything from zoning to pest control. We watch them leap out of trash cans, scuttle across streets, and (largely) avoid death by poison, pellet gun, and fishing rod. We hear about the things they’ve chewed through, and see the spaces where they’ve made their homes.

On the soundtrack, though, rats express themselves in a different way: they play the theremin.

Rat musicians at work inside the rat theremin.
Rat musicians at work inside the rat theremin.

The history of experimental music is filled with animal participants. Throughout the 1950s, the French composer Olivier Messiaen recorded prairie chickens and woodthrushes, transcribed their songs, and incorporated them into his pieces. A couple of years ago, artist Wolfgang Buttress had a band perform alongside 40,000 live bees at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

As Deacon first weighed Anthony’s request, he thought back to a bug-based performance he had learned about from one of his college professors, the composer Joel Thome. For this piece, four insects of different sizes were released on an overhead projector. “As the bugs moved from one corner to the next, the players played along,” explains Deacon. “The bugs became the score.”

This type of collaboration—in which the movements of an animal inspired the movement of a melody—“seemed like a good starting point,” he says. But he wondered if he could manage an even closer collaboration. “How can the rats actually make the sound?” he remembers thinking. “What kind of sensors can we put around them?”

Dan Deacon constructs the rat instrument.
Dan Deacon constructs the rat instrument.

That’s where the theremins came in. Deacon happened to have three lying around. Theremins are unusual in that you can play them without touching them—instead, two antennae poking out…

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