10-piece Tenori-on orchestra play Beethoven's 5th

Tenori-on orchestra
Tenori-on orchestra

An orchestra of Tenori-ons made its debut at the BT Visit London Awards last week. The performance - beginning with a string quartet playing Beethoven's 5th - builds to a crescendo of electronic beats from 10 of Yamaha's grid-like, light-up instruments.

The equally flashy ladies you can see carrying the Tenori-ons aren't actually playing them - they were pre-programmed by sound designer and Yamaha artist Marc01.

"The Tenori-on is a very inspirational tool - having the ability to program it in a very melodic way, and to suddenly switch to the more experimental layers such as Bounce and Random, opened up a world of possibilities," explains Marc01 via Yamaha's Download site.

"There are some beautiful sounds in there that really come to life when manipulated in real time. Having the luxury to use 10 Tenori-ons meant that I could really experiment with multiple layers, effects and processing to take the Tenori-on way beyond people's expectations of what it can do."

A stream of the performance, photos from the event and more from Marc01 are available at Yamahadownload.com.

Tom Porter worked on MusicRadar from its mid-2007 launch date to 2011, covering a range of music and music making topics, across features, gear news, reviews, interviews and more. A regular NAMM-goer back in the day, Tom now resides permanently in Los Angeles, where he's doing rather well at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).