Posts tagged machines
Lang Lang plays “Flight of the Bumblebee” on the iPad, presumably using Smule’s piano app that automatically plays the notes in proper sequence—you provide the timing with your taps. I especially like when he tries to play the real piano at the same time.
(via everyone)
Yuri Suzuki’s “White Noise Machine” is an object that responds to street noise with white noise. In the video, you can see it outside of a gallery in Delhi interacting with children. I like the idea of a “yelling machine” (although it seems like you could also change the responsiveness some and make it less like a blaster and more like a slowly changing intervention).
(via designboom)
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The RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer (1955): The Synthesis of Music (“Blue Skies,” by Irving Berlin)
This clip is from a series of 45s released by RCA to accompany the announcement of its then-new Electronic Music Synthesizer. In it, the narrator guides you through the creation of a synth version of “Blue Skies,” by Irving Berlin. It’s fun to hear someone talk about synthesizers from a time when the technology was so new. (So new, in fact, that the tunes on it were still sequenced using a player piano-like roll.)
What I find craziest about this is how fragile the song sounds at the end, like the oscillators are always about to fall out of tune, and the rhythm is about to come undone. With so much talk about the objectivity and precision of machines, it’s nice to hear machines sounding so close to the edge of failure.
You can listen to mp3s of the whole box set here.
(via Chris Ariza)
There is more than one way to automatically play a piano.
This is a close-up photo of the bow in a violin orchestrion. The bow is circular and spins around a set of violins. The violins are dipped outward to bring the strings in contact with the bow.
Look at all of those tiny knots! To make the bow circular, the strands have to be attached to the circle in short arcs.
There are more (amazing) pics of the whole mechanism in the Flickr stream here.
You can see a similar mechanism at work in this video.
(via the Mechanical Music group on Flickr)
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György Ligeti: Continuum (for player piano)
Following up on the barrel organ version and the original harpsichord version (as seen at acousmata), here is Continuum, arranged for player piano.
Again, it is fascinating to hear how the different mechanics of these instruments change the acoustic effects of the piece so dramatically. The percussive hits on the piano (then damped), don’t quite seem to blend together, but I think that works well for this piece, which is all about lingering at the edge between the discrete and the continuous.
And that’s all the Ligeti for now! Once I’ve finished up my beginning of year prospective thesis presentation, I’ll be able to dedicate time to some longer things on here, probably more about player pianos, although my copy of Analog Days just came in the mail…
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György Ligeti: Continuum (for barrel organ)
A quick followup to a previous re-blog from acousmata.
Ligeti’s Continuum, as played on a barrel organ. The barrel organ offers more precision than the human harpsichord player of the original can offer, but the quality of the notes from the organ is already more continuous. The harpsichord benefits from sharp, bright attacks. I also have the player piano arrangement now, so maybe that will have to go up sometime soon…
