Every Piece in This Chess Set Is a Tuned Brass Bell

Fish Fabrications, the Norfolk metal workshop founded by Sam Fish, has shared photos and footage of a musical chess set it made for the designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki during Suzuki's time as a partner at Pentagram. Every piece is a small brass bell, turned to tolerances tight enough that each one rings in tune, and one side's pieces are patinated to tell the two armies apart. The studio says the set was made a few years ago but never shared until now.

The bells were turned by Empire Manufacturing, with assistance on the project from Gabriel Vergara, Maxwell Sterling and Joe Hornby. In the release, the studio called making a set of small bells that ring in tune "incredibly technical." In the photos, the pieces stand in the holes of a perforated metal board.

Suzuki was a partner in Pentagram's London office from November 2018 to May 2024, and Suzuki's studio work has long turned playable objects and public spaces into instruments. Fish Fabrications has built for that practice before: for The Welcome Chorus, a 2019 Turner Contemporary commission in Margate, the workshop made the curved plinth that held 12 horns and a microphone post visitors could use. Founded in 2009 after Fish studied fine art at Chelsea College of Art, the workshop describes itself as a fabricator for artists, designers, museums and galleries.

Chess has a history as a musical score. In 1968, John Cage and Marcel Duchamp played a public game in Toronto on a board wired by Lowell Cross so that each move changed the sound in the room, a performance titled Reunion. Suzuki's set skips the wiring.

For more reading, see Designer-artist Yuri Suzuki plays with sound in first exhibition, Jason Rohrer is microdosing chess, Fish Fabrications on The Welcome Chorus and Yuri Suzuki's studio site.