Tristan Perich’s newest release in his set of 1-bit compositions is set to be released in August. Like his 1-Bit Music, the music is produced by a microchip stuck inside a CD jewel case.

I love this stuff because of the intentional play Tristan engages in around the ideas of “performance” and “liveness”: since the chip produces the music (in 1-bit, no less), it can be said to play “live.” Of course, this is similar to the way a player piano might be said to play “live,” in the way that “live” has come to mean “not on an audio recording.” 1-bit audio doesn’t need to be processed as it comes out of the chip—the ons and offs translate directly into the motion of the speaker cone—so it has a kind of immediacy.

Tristan was kind enough to sit in on a class I was taking at MIT last year and talk about his work with the Loud Objects, which provided me with the material to write an article about this kind of immediacy and “liveness” in the context of noise art. Maybe someday, when I’m done polishing up another thing, I’ll get back to that one and make it postable.

(via Synthtopia)

Tristan Perich’s Interval Studies are a set of speaker arrays that play with microtonal systems. These arrays take a conventional musical interval (like the perfect 4th from D1 to G1) and divide it up into very small intervals (so 99 steps from D to G instead of 4). Then (and this is the best part), the speakers play all of these steps simultaneously, allowing you to hear the space between the notes in a dense cloud.

Imagine banging your fist on the piano, except that instead of hitting 4 adjacent notes, you can hit 99 in the same tonal space. Awesome, right?

The work fits well into the rest of Tristan’s oeuvre: the tones emitted by the speakers are 1-bit pulse waves, and the economy of a simple array of bare speakers is quite aesthetically pleasing.

Here is a little documentary+interview with Tristan about the project (it only plays the sound for a moment, but I bet it’s better to hear in person anyway. Also, this embed won’t work for RSS or dashboard readers):

(via Networked Music Review)