Acoustic Occurences Live at Trinitatis Kirke in Copenhagen

Yesterday I played the first concert with all 24 mechanical devices with the "Acoustic Occurences" project. It was quite OK and there was a lot of people. Maybe 300-400. Here are some pictures of the setup in the beautiful church.

Acoustic events

I have spent some time during the summer building a new system for composing music. It is a bunch of stands that holds solenoids (electromagnetic pistons with a lever attached) and an object that makes a sound when the lever hits it. The solenoids can be controlled from maxMSP, using an arduino as interface. Here are the first prototypes I made.

Here I am building and playing around with 9 psc. of the final design in the apartment.

An Arduino Mega board works as interface to communicate with the Solenoids from maxMSP.

And here, the first concert at Musikhuset Aarhus on July 24. 2010 in the café area where people (mostly +60) enjoys salmon and expensive cake. It is a wonderful place to play concerts and the reverb of the big foyer really worked it's magic on the quite crappy objects, on which the solenoids knocked. It was cheap wine glasses and metal brackets and an old cookie jar.

here is a small video sample

Cassette tapes to the Queen

Yesterday (05.06.2010) Morten Riis and I played a concert at the Queens coach trip trough Aarhus. We had 7 cassette tape walkmen and played back a lot of danish old music. It was sort of a collage of hits from the last 50 years. At first we thought that we were actually going to play for the queen herself but later we found out that our concert had the purpose of entertaining the people waiting to wave at the Queen as she passed trough the city streets.

The concert lasted 45 minutes and ended as the Queen approached. It went very well but due to some misunderstanding a youth march orchestra was playing to the same audience at the same time as us.

To those who wanted to hear the youth orchestra it was ofcourse disturbing that we were playing at the same time. So a few older people asked us to turn it down or turn of the noise. Some were actually quite offensive.

But all in all it was ok and the interesting thing for us was ofcourse to see the reactions of the ones who were not prepared to hear a cassette collage of evergreens. And we also believe that most of the people enjoyed the old songs and had a interesting experience after all.

Manned spacecrafts

I found this nice little book from 1968 with the title "manned spacecrafts".

It's really interesting to read. First of all because it is about the rocket race between USA and Sovjet and the early years of the cold war and it's about H-bombs and spy reconnaissance planes and the first satellites.

Secondly because it gives a sense of the level of the technology at this time and how the voyages into space must have expanded every little boys fantasy with strange planets and advanced zivilizations.

Besides this it has fantastic graphics in it.

Invention of the speaker

I just read this autobiography by Peter L. Jensen (1886), called "Jensen, højttalerens opfinder" (1948). The history about the invention of the speaker varies depending on the source The earliest small speakers used in telephones was invented in 1860-1880, but the use of speakers to amplify the voice so that a speech could be heard by thousands at the same time, seems to be realised by Jensen in 1915. The speaker was based on the moving coil principle, which was already known, so he didn't get a patent. Some guys from AT&T got it almost 10 years later due to some improvements and more specific descriptions.

The book describes Jensen's work with Valdemar Poulsen on the first radio transmissions and the race against the spark transmitter of Marconi. And how he moves to U.S.A. in 1909 and experiences really loud feedback for the first time when testing the loudspeaker prototype. There are also stories about the invention of the electrical turntable cartridge and the radio tube. So the book is both a 1st person story about the early days of electrified media and a really interesting adventure of the son of a fisherman who became an important inventor. I borrowed it from this guy who got it from his father.

Wien Bridge Oscillator

This morning I just HAD to do a sine wave oscillator!

And so far it works... It is a Wein Bridge circuit. I don't know exactly what that means, but it is based on feedback in an op-amp, and and instead of a thermistor, a small lightbulb is used to stabilize the feedback. Charming solution, I think... I'm using one of the most crappy opamps, the LM741. It is old and noisy but even with this one the waveform seems quite OK.

And the spectrum analyzis confirms it. It's actually very pure!

... and clean up the breadboard... I always make a mess...

Touch represented at Spor-festival 2010

BJNielsen, Mike Harding and Jana Winderen

The label "touch" was represented at spor-festival with a concert by Jakob Kirkegaard, BJ Nielsen and Jana Winderen and a seminar led by Mike Harding, director of the label.

At the seminar Mike talked about the history of the label, which was founded in 1982. He also talked about the physicality of the media on which the music is released. The importance of the paper for the digipack and the colours, fonts and size of the booklet and all that. This was very interesting. All these things that music consists of, that is not the actual music, he refered to as "the other" and said that you should never forget "the other". I agree.