Adventure in Soundland

02/07/09
This is where I get ideas from other musicians and apply them to my own endevours or basically steel other peoples ideas for my own ends. I’ve always found this to be an entirely satisfactory way of doing things. One thing I won’t do though is steal wholesale, well I do actually but thats in schematics, but in the overall shape of a musical thing I will basically steal an idea and meld them with my own.

Last night I was at cross street studios and watched three performances of the type of music, experimental or soundscape, that I like to do. The first and the last featured an American based in Zurich who played a bass style drum with two mics, one dynamic or condensor mounted on the rim and facing the head and the other a contact piezo on the body. In conjunction with this he had a synthesiser box full of modules of the type with loads of patch wires to interconnect the various functions. The two mics were set up on volume pedals to feedback as was the drum head which picked up the room sound. The mans name was Jason Kahn and he worked with a set of flat steel plates, not unlike pot lids, and used air pressure from them to dampen the drum head. In conjunction with the synth box the whole setup was mightily interesting but the enactment didn’t do much for me and, so I was told, was indicative of the types of soundscapes made in the less obscure parts of the world. Okay, some of it was interesting but to me it was too controlled, monotonous and sterile and I can’t help thinking that the Zurich connection isn’t connected.
The middle set was by two Kiwis who played a zitherish instrument with the middle bridge and five string stretched across a polystyrene body. That made some very nice sounds but the few times that they miss notes was perturbing. Very Pelican orchestra type stuff but nowhere near as vibrant but give them some time rehearing and practising and I’m sure it’ll be quite pleasant as time goes on.

Anyways the whole thing was boring so my brain was at work trying to grab was was useful too me construction wise and to these ends I’ve thought out an instrument bigger than any I’ve done before.

First off I have two oscillators, one with a single LFO and a ribbon controller, and another with two LFO’s. The signal from these is played into a long tube, about two metres long with an electret mic capsule at the other end. Along the top of the tubes is a single string, most probably nylon as I have’nt used that yet so I can bow sounds that resonate with the sounds in the tube. The output from the electrets is amped and put into a speaker, mechanically attached and the cone removed, that sits atop a strung steel plate, ala plate reverb which has piezo’s mounted on it (Thanks Felix!). The signal from the piezos is the output but when it hits my mixer I can send the signal back to the beginning by putting an input control on the Oscillator box and basically adding another leg on the summing mixer of the oscillators, a feedback control as it were.

The points of interest, or things I’ll find out from doing this, revolve around the tuned resonances of the the tube and the slight lag in the tube making the signal travel at the speed of sound as opposed to travelling just under the speed of light as signals do in copper. Also the slight lags as the signals then travel accross the plate and its associated resonances. Given the Oscillators have three LFO’s and theres a string strung along the top of the tube I should be able to get some quite interesting sounds from what is essentially a drone machine.