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In
the process of building spherical speakers and sensor bows--all
in an effort to improve upon the electric violin--it became clear
that an unusual creation was inevitable. Perry Cook and I built
spherical speakers in an effort to improve the sound and presence
of the electric violin--traditional monodirectional guitar speakers
don't fill rooms in the same way as acoustic instruments, and PA
systems tend to diffuse and fragment, making it hard to blend with
other acoustic instruments. We built the R-bow (a violin bow with
various sensors) to alleviate my frustration with crude, unexpressive
computer interfaces like footpedals. This was followed by the construction
of the Fangerbored (a violin fingerboard with sensors) and the Bonge
(an array of bowed sensor-sponges). It occurred to me that a certain
kind of "electronic chamber music" might be possible by combining
these wonderful new instruments with the presence and intimacy of
spherical speakers: hence, the Critter...
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| for
Bowed-Sensor-Speaker-Array (aka, the Critter) |
| composed
and performed by Dan Trueman, 1999 |
| with
the voice of Monica Mugan |
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Having
constructed the 12-channel speaker with my father--a
physicist
and instrument builder--I requested that my mother--a
painter--paint it. She did, and to my surprise I found
it covered with text ("Will you, won't you, will you,
won't you, won't you join the dance?" scrambled logically
across the twelve faces of the speaker). After I finally
finished mounting the Fangerbored and Bonge on the speaker,
the text (from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland) became
the perfect inspiration for the Critter's first piece.
Setting a poem for a Bowed-Sensor-Speaker-Array (the
Critter's
formal title) is obviously an unprecedented endeavor,
and in this case a brief endeavor; approximately five
minutes in length, the Lobster Quadrille uses some simple
mappings--bow direction controls sample playback direction,
finger position controls playback speed, shaking the
bow excites a model of bamboo windchimes, and all of
these are fed through a set of four comb filters, whose
pitches change over the course of the piece (I think
of these as analogous to the resonating strings on a
Hardanger fiddle, but resonating strings that can be
retuned on the fly). |
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