I went to a festival in Kent – and had a revelation about human ingenuity | Zoe Williams

‘I’ll just play for 12 to 15 minutes,” the composer and experimenter Chase Coley said, “and then I’ll take questions. People always have a lot of questions.” The scene was a square in Ramsgate for its annual festival of sound, with guitar wires strung from a piano at one end to a tree about 20 metres away. Coley covered his fingers in violin rosin (sticky resin) and walked up and down the wires, coaxing noises out of each one by stroking them; brass sounded different to steel, and none of it added up to a melody, exactly; it was more of an eerie soundscape. The piano acted as a resonator while the tree was playing itself, a tree. It’s called a “long-stringed instrument”, but considering the vanishingly small number of people who play it – the American musician who invented it in 1980, Ellen Fullman, an experimental luthier named Yuri Landman and Coley himself – there’s probably scope to rename it as the mood takes them. If he had more of an ego, he could call it the chase bass, but this really isn’t an ego instrument. It’s an instrument to flood every sense with bafflement, and bring out the part in everyone that doesn’t mind being baffled. So long-stringed is as good a name as any.

He was right: there were a lot of questions. What happens if you pluck the strings? (Nothing – because these aren’t transverse sound waves, they’re longitudinal.) Why does it sound a bit like the Star Wars intro music? (Because everything does, once it’s weird enough.) Is he really the only person in the UK who knows how to do this? (So far as we know, yes.) But really all the questions were a small-talk buildup to a gigantic “why?”. Why would anyone take a piano, turn it inside out and make it into an incredibly long, disembodied guitar? And that kind of answered itself in the performance, which was the pure spirit of “just to see what will happen”, rendered in sound. Whether it was music, science, low-key standup or installation art really depended on whether you listened to it for 10 minutes or 10 hours. “One more question,” a guy said. “Can you play Wonderwall?” Coley looked doubtful. “I could have a go at some kind of tune,” he offered. “No, it’s fine,” the guy said, “I was joking.” Only Coley could play the long-stringed instrument (it is apparently very hard), but in this symphony of curiosity, it turned out we all had some maracas.