January 2010
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Over at BLDGBLOG:
On the advice of a friend here in New York, my wife and I went over to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on New Year’s Eve to watch the school’s underground steam infrastructure be transformed, temporarily, into a thunderous musical instrument. Somewhere between subterranean calliope and mutant wave organ, steam-powered explosions of sound threatened to deafen everyone...
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Florent Ghys’s “Music for Multiple Basses, and the President of the United States” falls into the category of contemporary composition that I don’t usually blog about, but as it features the President and a title I kind of like, I decided to post it here anyway.
I do really enjoy how musical accompaniment can draw out the rhythmic and tonal patterns in regular speech (and...
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This is a preview of the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra, a group that brings together custom-built robotic musical instruments and human performers with modified instruments, unique musical interfaces, and hemispherical speaker-pods.
Can’t help but reblog something called the “machine orchestra.”
(update: and some more details over at Create Digital Music.)
(via Synthtopia )
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I found this video over at Everyday LIstening:
Staalhemel (steel sky) is an interactive installation created by Christoph de Boeck. Using a wireless device for capturing brain waves, the participants’ brain activity influences the activity of the installation.
The installation is quite aesthetically pleasing, although I’m curious about the practicalities: only one person at a time?...
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Over at Weird Vibrations, Ben blogged about an art project that uses the same principle of acoustic levitation as this video I blogged a few days ago. He comes to a similar conclusion as I did about the impact of these demonstrations on one’s ideas about “sound”:
Sonolevitation “wows” us because we imagine sound as propagating in an autonomous and indescribable channel – a...
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Rui Penha’s Robotic Gamelan is part of a “robotic percussion” roundup over at Create Digital Music. (yeah, I’m still catching up on blogs from the holidays, so what?)
The mallets are really gorgeous (are they typical gamelan equipment, just fastened to mechanical actuators? I’m not familiar enough with gamelan music to know). Also amazing are basically all the other...
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Backwards Piano Roundup
Thank to a little hint from @synthgear and inspired by this “backwards” piano post, I recently went on a journey into the YouTube world of backwards piano playing. Here are some of my favorites, categorized into what will surely be a dominant typology of backwards piano styles:
(If you’re reading in the Tumblr dashboard or RSS, these vids probably won’t show up, so click...
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condemned_bulbes is a sound and light installation created by digital creation studio artificiel. The installation was first exposed in 2003 but is still shown at festivals around the globe.
It is really nice to see a sound installation involving light bulbs that actually uses the sound of light bulbs, rather than just their on/off capabilities.
(via Everyday Listening)
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