The Sea Monkey Experience
About the Experience
It began with a simple gesture: placing a small tank of Sea Monkeys on my office desk. In a space typically associated with institutional seriousness, the Sea Monkeys introduced whimsy, vulnerability, and smallness. Visitors were invited to respond with a single anonymous word describing how the Sea Monkeys made them feel.
Then, emotion is translated into movement as language becomes choreography.
Using Chrome? Press T to open the tuner and shape the choreography yourself. The tuner arrives as a popup window—if nothing appears, allow popups for this site.
About the Series
For one year of my life (June 2025-May 2026), every time I boarded a flight, I recorded the safety announcement on my phone. The ritual was always familiar: the cadence of the instructions, the hum of the cabin, the strange intimacy of language designed to be heard and forgotten.
Those recordings become source material. Speech, engine noise, cabin atmosphere, and interruption were cut, layered, and shaped into short tracks tied to specific flights.
One phrase always returned: full upright and locked position. Over time it has become a refrain, a marker, almost an obsession.
About the Work
Courtney Crappell (b. 1977)
Chromalume No. 8, 2025
Interactive light installation with Raspberry Pi, MIDI controller, LED panels, and audio
The Short Version: Play some black keys to start making art.
The Long Version: Chromalume No. 8 is an interactive sonic painting, one composed of pitch, time, and light. This is not a painting to be merely observed; it is one that should become a personal experience, and so in its idle phase, Chromalume No. 8 encourages the viewer to become the artist by wearing the headphones and pressing a key.
For the viewer/artist, Chromalume No. 8 becomes a musical and visual conversation, shaped in real time by the performer's harmonic choices. At the core of the piece lies a musical key: G-flat major. Notes that "belong" to this key appear as soft, saturated starbursts, gently populating the canvas. In contrast, tones from outside the key yield more dramatic effects that add friction, intensity, or surprise. When dissonance gives way to consonance, the display responds in kind, offering visual release. In this way, the composition of color and light mirrors the musical experience: harmony and contrast, arrival and departure.
Chromalume No. 8 explores how the structure of music can create visual meaning, and how the language of tonality can be extended beyond the ear into the eye and the imagination.
N.B.: more red . . . more blue . . . more beer . . . more light!
About the Work
“Kin”esthesia (Courtney & Annabelle Crappell)
The World's Heartstrings, 2026
Interactive sculptural installation with painted surface and tuned chime elements
The World Plays Kansas City is an invitation to listen with your hands, your eyes, and your sense of connection to places far beyond where you stand. Shaped as a world map wrapped around a heart, the piece traces a single continuous line across continents, linking cities through melody rather than distance. At each stop—from Kansas City to Japan—the line opens into a fragment of song, a familiar tune carrying the voice of its culture into a shared space. Inside the heart, those melodies become playable, transformed into chime pipes that invite anyone passing by to step in and bring the world to life through sound.
This is not a composition with a fixed beginning or end; it is a living score that depends on participation, chance, and curiosity. As notes overlap and rhythms collide, visitors create fleeting harmonies that echo the way cultures meet, blend, and evolve. The work celebrates Kansas City not just as a geographic point, but as a gathering place—a city that opens itself to the world and is changed by the meeting. Music becomes the common language, the connective thread, the shared pulse.
In this space, the boundaries between listener and performer dissolve, and the act of play becomes an act of belonging. The world doesn't just arrive in Kansas City—it resonates here, waiting to be heard, one note at a time.
About the Work
Courtney Crappell (b. 1977)
A Suite in Style: Four Arrangements of Children's Songs, c. 2014–2016
Four piano miniatures on children's folk tunes, composed in the styles of Bartók, Debussy, Prokofiev, and Ginastera
Every child knows these tunes. Twinkle, Twinkle. London Bridge. The Itsy Bitsy Spider. Pop! Goes the Weasel. In this suite I hand each one to a different twentieth-century composer and let them reshape it in their own voice.
But there's a second tune hiding in each piece. As the nursery melody plays on top, the composer's own music surfaces underneath. These are real quotations, fragments of the composer's best-known works woven into the harmony and the accompaniment, so two familiar things sound at once: the song every child knows, and the masterwork threaded beneath it. Bartók sets Twinkle over the drive of his folk dances. Debussy floats London Bridge through the haze of his préludes. Prokofiev marches the spider up the spout with his sharp-edged wit. Ginastera sends the weasel home on the pulse of his malambo.
The idea is simple. When a student already knows the melody, they can stop hunting for the tune and start listening for the style. A familiar song becomes a doorway into a composer's sound-world, one they'll meet again later in harder repertoire. It's the same thing Bartók did in For Children and the Mikrokosmos, folk songs as a way in.
view full score (PDF)About the Experience
It began with a simple gesture: placing a small tank of Sea Monkeys on my office desk. In a space typically associated with institutional seriousness, the Sea Monkeys introduced whimsy, vulnerability, and smallness. Visitors were invited to respond with a single anonymous word describing how the Sea Monkeys made them feel.
Then, emotion is translated into movement as language becomes choreography.
Using Chrome? Press T to open the tuner and shape the choreography yourself. The tuner arrives as a popup window—if nothing appears, allow popups for this site.