Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
Here is a more in-depth video about Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion Tour. In it, you can see more of the variety of instruments LEMUR has constructed for Metheny, and you can see the awesome processing that allows him to play a xylophone with his guitar, live. (Yeah, whoa.)
It’s all really interesting stuff, and exciting for me personally to see this potential resurgence of explicitly “mechanical” music.
Back when I was looking up more about orchestrions, I stumbled across a written teaser for Pat Metheny’s upcoming Orchestrion Tour. Reminiscing about the automatic instruments he saw as a child, he wanted to create a “modern” orchestrion and take it on tour with him. Well, there is a video now, and with the folks from LEMUR, he’s got a prototype. It appears to play run-of-the-mill smooth jazz, which is disappointing for some commenters over at Create Digital Music, but I am definitely impressed by the abilities of these contraptions at making something actually sound somewhat “smooth” (even if that wouldn’t be my genre of choice either). That said, I agree with the commenter over there who wants these robots to do more than play smooth jazz; maybe after some live action, Metheny will let them take advantage of their robot capabilities more thoroughly.
Are we about to enter some crazy world where I actually want Pat Metheny tickets?
(via Create Digital Music)
A freshly refurbished Orchestrion. My favorite parts: the xylophone and that thing that just makes a clicking sound (like around 0:30). What instrument is that supposed to be?
(via immanent discursivity)
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)
