mounts:

Bird cage with real birds and 2 real vertical pianos – when birds jump on the aluminium straw they play piano notes, robert gligorovs.

(via kindofbleu)

This installation looks fantastic:

Five modified toy pianos circulate the gallery on five elevated wooden tracks. Each piano is equipped with small speakers to play amplified sounds picked up from conductive tape on the tracks. Each piano also contains small motors which intermittently spin to strike the toy pianos’ tone bars, adding acoustic elements to the overall soundtrack of the work.

Needless to say, the idea of toy pianos riding atop magnetic tape and picking up samples as they go is a brain-tickler.

Fantasie no. 1 for Mobile Pianos (by Joe Winter)

[p.s. I disappeared again, due to the curse of saying “I’ll be back” on one’s blog. Turns out the 1st year of a PhD program is work-intensive. No promises, but I will try to squeeze in the funs here as much as possible.]

Apologies for the unannounced (and nearly month-long, yeesh) hiatus. Finding housing and moving across the country is time-consuming!

Back soon, with more goodies.

(via maxencecyrin)

(Source: youtube.com)

An improvement, I would say, on the katzenklavier.

“The 715 Four-Note Chords,” from Chord Catalogue by Tom Johnson

I like to think of “The Chord Catalogue” as a sort of natural phenomenon—something which has always been present in the ordinary musical scale, and which I simply observed, rather than invented. It is not so much a composition as simply a list.

In his Chord Catalogue, Tom Johnson plays every possible combination of notes within one octave. This segment runs through all of the 715 possible combinations of four notes. You can see the score [PDF] here, although the piece is typically communicated verbally by explaining the process through which one can hit every chord—raising the lowest note one semitone at a time, until it hits the second lowest note, at which point that note shifts up and the process repeats. Rests separate each of those short runs. (If you’re curious, there are 8178 possible chords. When you get to the nine, ten, eleven, and twelve-note chords, it gets tough to tell them apart!)

Another marvelous hybrid instrument from Diego Stocco: the Bassoforte, constructed from the parts of a piano keyboard and an electric bass (among other things), and played with loops and great aplomb. I think it sounds kind of like a sick cover version of “Personal Jesus.”

(via Synthtopia)

Going to see this tonight, very excited. Sez Wikipedia:

Mantra is a composition by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was composed in 1970 and premiered in autumn of the same year in Donaueschingen. The work is scored for two ring-modulated pianos; each player is also equipped with a chromatic set of crotales (antique cymbals) and a wood block, and one player is equipped with a short-wave radio producing morse code or a magnetic tape recording of morse code.

(via New England Conservatory)

update: Whoa.

Because it’s Wednesday. (click through if you can’t see the videos.)

Yvonne Loriod playing “Le Moqueur Polyglotte” (The Mockingbird) from Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux étoiles. RIP.

(Part 2 here.)

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)