Anne Hege: The Tape Machine

“I want it to be a sculpture, a relic, an instrument, as if from the middle ages, home made, yet futuristic. I want it to be a functional instrument. I want the audio processing to be visible and physical, tactile... I want to see it, multi-media in the form of object art (sculpture) meets art in the time dimension (sound), and then the tape, something that stores the events, has these ghosts of the past, something staining, tape as document”
– brainstorming notes from artist’s journal Nov. 26, 2007

The tape machine presented here is the second generation. This version is more reliable as a performance instrument and more beautiful (depending what you consider beautiful) inspired by a dream of a wooden tape machine that looked like an old roller coaster.

Born in Oakland, CA, Anne Hege began her musical studies singing with the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir and the Oakland Youth Chorus. Formative projects with innovators such as Keith Terry and Linda Tillery inspired her multimedia leanings while singing for Redwood Cultural Works in the mid 90’s. Hege received her BA from Wesleyan University and MA in music composition from Mills College where she worked with Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Alvin Curran and Fred Frith. She performs original works in her performance duos, New Prosthetics and Sidecar, as well as in the vocal trio, Celestial Mechanics. Her latest work lies somewhere between ritual, music, and theater with some homemade instruments thrown in for good measure. Hege is currently working towards a PhD in music composition at Princeton University, more information can be found at www.annehege.com.

Lisa R. Coons: percussion sculpture

Growing up on a farm in northeast Missouri, Lisa R. Coons acquired a special affinity to noise composition and found sounds.  She studied composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City during her undergraduate degree and received her Masters from SUNY Stony Brook.  Presently a graduate student at Princeton University, her recent work has expanded to include works for amplified instruments, turntables, and metal percussion sculptures with homemade electronics.  She received the 2005 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award for her string quartet Awkward Music and is a member of the New York-based composers collective, The Collected.

Peter Musselman: We learn and explore through movement, we sense it and recreate it. We play with movement and live and breathe through it. Movement creates memory regained through retracing familiar arcs. Movements translate into audible and subaudible waves that propagate and die with predictable precision. Wheels on rails trace a repeatable and reversable sequence of turbulent bumps and retrofitted joints, accelerations and long waits. This gramophone is amplifying topography. We know where we are by the slowness of the bridge. Head bones and suitcases synchronize in arhythm of stereo tracks.

Peter Musselman received an M.F.A. in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in 2008, focusing on the development of gesture-based laptop performance instruments. By fusing gesture, image, sound, and a sense of wonder and exploration, he hopes to welcome people of all ages and backgrounds into the world of music. He teaches Pre-Kindergarten through 1st grade music at Oregon Episcopal School in Portland, Oregon. His music duo, The Speakers, makes rare appearances, at which you might be able to catch a fleeting glimpse of The Suitcase of Mystery. For more information: www.peterspencemusselman.com.

Trueman
BOSSA: the bowed-sensor-speaker-array
webpage link: http://music.princeton.edu/~dan/BoSSA/

As a performing composer, I play various kinds of violins, including the 6-string electric violin, the Hardanger fiddle, and instruments of my own design and construction. Much of my music arises from my relationships with these instruments, either directly (through improvisation) or metaphorically (where the design of the instrument becomes a metaphor for some kind of musical construction). Recognizing that musical instruments embody both compositional and cultural ideas, I build my own instruments, both "hardware" and "software," and regard this as part of my compositional process. I perform these instruments in various ensembles, including Trollstilt (a duo for Hardanger/electric fiddles and guitar, with Monica Mugan) and "interface" (an electronic improvisation ensemble, with Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn). These projects inevitably lead me into interdisciplinary explorations with dancers, visual artists, and computer scientists. I studied Physics at Carleton College (B.A. 1990), Composition and Theory at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati (M.M. 1995), and Composition at Princeton (Ph.D. 1999). At Princeton I teach composition, electronic/computer music and theory at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and seminars that explore: "crossover" music and musical appropriation; musical instruments, music and culture; interdisciplinary creative spaces, and others.

Perry Cook: DigitalDoo: Sensor/Speaker-Augmented Digeridoo and PicoShakers with NogginSonix: JMug, a Musical Coffee Mug,
and Senor Froggie, a Musical Maraca, projected through the NogginSonix 1 cranial speaker array.

DigitalDoo: Sensor/Speaker-Augmented Digeridoo

The Digeridoo is a sacred aboriginal instrument of Australia, and my digeridoo was hand crafted by natives of that continent. The digitaldoo sleeve I designed and built slides over the natural instrument without harming it, providing controls over electronic processing of the natural instrument sound, and control over sound/music synthesis.The DigitalDoo is sensitive to squeezing the sleeve and tilting, and the rotary knobs and push buttons provide additional control.

The "SnorkelPhonix" speaker has two microphones mounted in cups on the back, into which the player may direct the natural instrument sound for processing and amplification. Adventurous or shy, young or old, you might find it fun to bend down and sing/speak into these microphones
too!

Pico Shakers and NogginSonix I: Musical objects projected through a cranial speaker array.

Beginning in 1996 I began creating a number of musical/sonic controllers based on everyday objects. The Frog-Maraca, or Seno~r Froggie, plays fusion jazz when you shake him. The JavaMug plays latin techno-music in response to squeezing the force sensing resistor (FSR) dots, tilting, rotating the knob, and pushing the buttons. Both devices control a fairly standard General MIDI synthesizer

The sound is projected through one of my Cranial Speaker Arrays, or NogginSonix Speakers. These were created primarly for vocal synthesis and processing, but they look so odd and provocative that I like to use them for a variety of installations and performances.

Perry R. Cook attended the University of Missouri at Kansas City Conservatory of Music from 1973 to 1977, studying voice and electronic music. He worked as a sound engineer and designer from 1976 - 1981. He received a BA in music in 1985, and a BS in Electrical Engineering in 1986 from UMKC. He received a Masters and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1990. Along with working for companies such as NeXT Inc., Media Vision, Xenon/Chromatic, and Interval Research, he continued at Stanford as Technical Director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, until joining the faculty of Princeton University in 1996, where he is now a Full Professor of Computer Science, with a joint appointment in Music. He is also a founding advisor and consultant to the iPhone application company Sonic Mule (SMule).

Jay Kreimer is a musician, instrument maker, sculptor, composer and educator. More to the point, he is an alchemist of hardware stores, surplus catalogs, and discarded objects. Kreimer has spent a lifetime assembling new things out of little scraps of possibility. In the past year Kreimer has performed across Europe, in San Francisco, in Beijing, and regionally in the center of the United States. He has shown work, over the past few years, in collaboration with Wendy Weiss, in Beijing, San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Washington D.C, and other cities.
Three Hands, Three Flowers is the fourth iteration of an idea for an instrument that arrived as a dream of stacked threes. The engineering of the instrument has been intuitive, if informed by years of playing and construction. As the instrument developed, it became clear that it could be played by three or more people at a time, using bows, hands and sticks. This has led to the development of other multi player instruments. The unusual overtones created by the triple stringed arrays, with interacting tuning between groups of strings on flexible masts, hint at the mutuality and complex interaction between all of us, and the musical, if not predictable, possibilities of those interactions.