NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Like most people these days, sound artist Ellen Fullman is sheltering in place. But she has an unusual roommate: a massive installation she calls the Long String Instrument.

Filling the ground floor of her home in Berkeley, California, the instrument forms a corridor of tautly suspended horizontal wires, 45 1/2 feet long. Flanked by 20 strings on each side, her fingers coated in rosin, Fullman, 62, walks a central aisle while rubbing the strings lengthwise, conjuring thrumming minimalist drones and quickly shifting overtones.

“The Long String Instrument is an installation that I really have been working on my entire adult life,” Fullman said by phone recently. “Starting from something that was very raw: just one string, and more of a noisy thing. But I saw potential for it in musical tone.”

Her most recent concert was at the University of Northern Colorado in early March. Once she was home in California, the cancellations began, including a planned performance at the Centre Pompidou’s location in Metz, France. She was hardly alone among musicians who spent much of March watching concerts, festivals and residencies be postponed or canceled — with an attendant, often devastating loss of income.

It was fortunate timing, then, when Fullman was named a Guggenheim fellow in early April. The prestigious award will provide financial support over the coming year as she works on a new composition for the JACK Quartet and her Long String Instrument.

For the foreseeable future, her collaboration with the quartet will be online. “Once there is a vaccine developed, I will go to New York — maybe in two, maybe three years,” Fullman said. “I don’t feel safe traveling, personally. I’m in that over-60 crowd, so I wouldn’t want to take a chance.”

But Fullman’s music is predicated on travel, and on the kind of immersive, in-person experience that is currently — and for at least the coming months — forbidden. Since she developed it in 1980, her instrument has thrived on live presentations, and she has reimagined it for the particular acoustics of each venue. A typical performance requires four or five days of laborious installation and tuning to adjust to spaces that have included a Romanesque cathedral in Cologne and a museum in Tasmania, as well as the Church of St. Merri in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

For now, Fullman’s home installation must suffice. This year marks four decades of developing the Long String Instrument, and she shows no signs of slowing down her tinkering with it. She has been experimenting with different wire material, loving what she calls the “clarity of steel and the warmth of bronze”; various types of wood, currently rosewood for the resonator boxes and ebony for the bridge; and alternative performance techniques.

Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, with a love for Delta blues, Fullman played clarinet in the school band for just one year. “Honestly, with the clarinet,” she said, “as I started to sound like the instrument was supposed to sound, I kind of lost interest.” Her creative energies were mainly channeled into visual art.

She studied ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute but switched her focus to sculpture and began creating performance art. A visiting professor introduced her to the music of maverick composer and instrument builder Harry Partch. “It just struck something in me,” Fullman recalled. “I just felt so at home.”

Living in Minnesota after college, Fullman performed her feminist sound sculpture “Streetwalker” in 1980. Strolling through Minneapolis’ red-light district, Fullman wore a clangorous metallic skirt she had designed, which simultaneously garnered attention and provided armor. With guitar strings connecting the skirt to her shoes, each step caused a wailing glissando. Attaching a contact mic to her skirt, she carried a small amplifier like a purse, broadcasting her noise.

The performance was part of the festival New Music America, where she found a sense of community. “It introduced me to my world and my people,” she said, “and I didn’t even know they existed.” She met composer Pauline Oliveros, who would become a mentor and was known for a performance practice she called “deep listening.” And Fullman heard about — but did not witness — Alvin Lucier’s installation “Music on a Long Thin Wire,” in which a single wire, driven by a sine-wave oscillator and excited by a magnet, produced a quivering drone.

Inspired by the idea of Lucier’s work, Fullman began experimenting with her own single wire late in 1980, and she relocated to New York the next year.

After securing a loft in Brooklyn to live in, she needed to find space for her instrument, which had expanded to multiple strings.

“There was no place to go, so I snuck up on the roof and built a prototype,” she recalled. “And then I got a phone call from the landlord to get all that junk off the roof.”

Studio space was scarce, but community was not. She discovered like-minded musicians at downtown Manhattan venues like Roulette and Experimental Intermedia. Roulette’s co-founder, David Weinstein, recommended she tune her wires in just intonation, a crucial suggestion that allowed the strings’ fundamental pitches to better resonate with the instrument’s prominent overtones — the higher frequencies that sound above each string’s fundamental pitch.

Weinstein joined Fullman for a 1984 performance of “Longitudinal Vibration” in Hartford, Connecticut. A New York Times reporter described it: “There was no melody, just a sustained line of mellow tones that built and built in tension — not unlike the beauty of deep notes from a cello.”

A residency in the Netherlands led to Fullman’s 1985 debut album, “The Long String Instrument,” which was reissued on Superior Viaduct in 2015. Composer Arnold Dreyblatt performed with Fullman on the opening track, “Woven Processional,” in which the strings’ timbre veers between edgy buzzing and smoother humming. Softly in the background, the Water Drip Drum — another creation of Fullman’s — adds ambient patter, as droplets strike an amplified metal pan.

For the next decade, the Long String Instrument and its creator lived in Austin, Texas. “I had been scrambling in New York and didn’t have enough cash flow to rent a loft or to have a permanent location,” Fullman said. Amid the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, many buildings in Austin lay empty, and a sympathetic developer let her use a space rent-free, permitting her years of extensive innovation.

“This project is my personal music school, leading me to read and experiment with musical acoustics, instrument building and tuning systems,” Fullman wrote in 1986.

Once that rent deal ended, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts allowed Fullman to rent an old candy factory to house her instrument. There she recorded the album “Suspended Music” with the Deep Listening Band (Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and David Gamper), a trio known for minimalist droning improvisations.

Heading west in 1997, Fullman moved to Seattle, where she found a welcoming improvisation scene. By day she worked as a graphic designer to afford her instrument’s loft space, where she practiced at night. During a fellowship year in Berlin, she collaborated with composer Jörg Hiller on the album “Ort,” which includes her own songs — as well as an ethereal cover of Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home,” with Fullman singing over her instrument’s soaring harmonies. Using a wooden implement called a box bow, Hiller coaxes out of the strings a pulsing harmonica sound.

Back in the United States, the dot-com bubble had burst, making design work scarce. She moved to the Bay Area, where she has lived since 2003. Her recent album releases include new and old music: “The Air Around Her” presents a duo with cellist and improviser Okkyung Lee, recorded in 2016, and “In the Sea” features compositions from the 1980s, including music previously available only on cassette.

Under the restrictions of California’s stay-at-home order, Fullman’s day-to-day life has not changed much. “I pretty much live this way anyway,” she said. “It’s just a little bit more confined. The main difference is just how scary it is to just go to the grocery store. But I live in a very simple way.”

Fullman shares her home with her spouse, cellist Theresa Wong, and their duo album “Harbors” is scheduled for release later this year. In place of live performance, Fullman has considered streaming her playing online.

“I might do it,” she said, “but I am not sure the resolution of the audio would be good enough to convey what is interesting about my music.”

Her main rituals — daily running and coffee-fueled practicing — continue largely as they were before the coronavirus outbreak, with one exception: She is currently preoccupied with repairs, after recent concerts in cool, dry climates caused cracks in the instrument’s glue joints.

“The ideal for me is to play my instrument every day,” she said. “And I only do that for about an hour, but it changes everything about my day. I always write about my experience afterward, sort of like a diary.”

That diary mostly contains tablature notation, but one entry, from before quarantine, in December, reads: “Try to find resonances — textural miracles that are confusing as to structure but spinning and mesmerizing.”

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