With her pierced nose, head shaved down one side, cap pushed back and full of attitude, Michelle Smith is fusing two very different worlds.
Harp hop.
Jazz harp meets hip hop.
"My intentions are once I perform I want people to go: 'I had no idea a harp could do that', because it can do so much."
The Perth musician started last year by jamming to a Jay Z track for her friends in the backyard.
Someone filmed it and got attention.
Since then, with the help of Perth videographer David Vincent Smith, she's put together two slick videos jamming to tracks by Mos Def and Nas.
The latest, New York State of Mind by Nas, has attracted nearly 10,000 views in just under two weeks.
"It's amazing. When it comes to, if you put a beat behind, I mean everyone has training and tortuous exercises they don't want to do, but if I put a beat behind something and once I've learned all my scales, I can just play away. It's like I lose concept of time. Music is just a way you can express yourself without having to talk. It's man's greatest triumph so if I have something that's fun and is expressing the way I am, then that's my purest way of enjoying the present. It's an amazing feeling. I'll never get sick of that."
Michelle Smith says she's even garnered international attention and is working with a London-based hip hop producer on some tracks.
And she says the harpist in United States President Barack Obama's orchestra has given her his tick of approval via social media.
"It's the coolest instrument. It's 47 strings of latin, it's 47 strings of blues, it's 47 strings of hip-hop. So if I can really take it out of its normal range and show people, 'hey it doesn't actually have to be in an orchestra', it could be with Mos Def, it could be with Nas, it could be with a progressive metal band. It can do all these things. It just needs the right training."
Experimental music researcher Cat Hope, from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, says musicians aren't even nearly finished when it comes to musical experimentation.
"It's from the kind of avant garde stuff from the beginning of the 21st century, it's like everywhere now. So it's a really exciting time to combine different styles of music, different instruments, take them, completely uproot them, from their tradition and put them in other places. Turntablism is another exciting one. And computers are getting smaller and more agile and more user friendly so you're getting people that don't have to have a computer degree any more to program your computer."
Associate Professor Cat Hope says it's not just classical music joining the contemporary music scene either.
"So you get things like noise-based guitar turning up in orchestra or electric instruments in the pit and laptops even in folk music so this whole idea of technology moving through experimental music is really important and I think this project makes the most of the tradition of the harp and new technologies and new approaches to music to develop something really new and exciting."
