“In conventional stringed instruments a portion of the vibratory sound produced thereby is absorbed by the body of the instrument through its bridge. The body of the instrument thus picks up all sound impurities and at the same time.produces rapid tone decay. In the case of electronically amplified instruments such harmful effects produced by the instrument body are even greater.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide an arrangement for insulating the vibratory sound from the body of the instrument while playing a musical instrument of the guitar family.”
Damn, now you have infected me with your gear lust. I want one, its too beautiful!
Well, you know how this works: either you pass on the gear lust within 7 days, or the creepy ghosts in your machines will crawl out your oscilloscope sockets!
Very nice. I see they offer sample sets on the builder’s website. Not quite the same as playing one. It may sate your appetite and save your plastic friend from reaching critical failure mode!
Ack, no! I don’t think I’m overly snobby about sampling but the Waterphone is such an organic, tactile, and responsive instrument that I personally wouldn’t be able to stomach emulating it with static recordings.
Lifting it’s (notable) weight, swirling the internal water around during sustained notes, exploring the many ways of working with it in realtime: these are such intrinsic parts of it’s interaction experience for me that anything lesser would be distasteful. I would just synthesize some pure-ish swirly tones instead if the resultant sound was my only interest.
Besides, I am incredibly disciplined at deferring lust-driven instrument acquisition these days. Ironically, that comes from having been easily seduced in the past and thus being able to counter “I really want X” impulses with “but I still haven’t fully explored the depths of A through V yet.”
[I should note that I don’t find any of the techno geek toys listed to be particularly odd but I recognise that my perspective on these things may be a little pre-warped.]
When composers wrote for these instruments they sometimes loved them and sometimes chafed at their limitations, but in any case they wrote for those sounds, that touch, those bells and whistles. From old instruments, performers on modern pianos can get important insights into the sound image that Mozart, Schubert, et al., were aiming for. But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn’t just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can’t even be played as written on modern pianos. One example is the double-octave glissando in the last movement of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata. With the light action and shallow key dip of a period Viennese piano you can plant your thumb and little finger on the octave and slide to the left, and there it is. Given the much heavier action and deeper key dip of a modern piano, if you tried that today you’d dislocate something. Every pianist has a dodge for that passage. It’s said that before the glissando Rudolf Serkin would discreetly spit on his fingers.
[…]
To be sure, Steinways are tremendous instruments and have earned their glory. But should any one brand be that dominant? A modern piano is a matter of iron and steel and high-tech and some degree of assembly line. In the days of Beethoven and Schubert, it was a matter of one man or woman (such as the legendary Nannette Streicher) with hammers, saws, planes, and chisels, and there were myriad visions of what a piano could be. Stephen Porter notes that now in Europe a number of artisanal makers are creating first-rate reproductions of old instruments. There are fewer pursuing that trade here. In America, these days, we mainly have Michael Frederick and his Historic Piano Collection, our own testament to the value of diversity and the subtle splendors of low-tech.
Often we are asked which pitch layout SoundPrism is based on. With the following article I would like to start to talk about the idea behind SoundPrism and how it came to be until today. The development of the SoundPrism interface is a process that started many years ago. As I was writing my PhD thesis at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology I was allowed to discover many interesting relationships between musical structure and that what we actually feel when we’re listening to music.
Today I am able to say: The possibilities we have with instruments like SoundPrism are only the beginning.
Musical Imagination and musical interfaces
Before I start to explain the pitch layout of SoundPrism, let me talk about the basic motivation of the instruments we are developing.
The image below (Figure 1) shows a model of music creation and musical imagination.
Figure 1: Model of musical imagination and music creation
As you can see, the origin of every musical piece is some kind of „musical imagination“. This can be a certain feeling, a certain emotion, an association, a certain musical piece or something entirely differnt. In Figure 1 musical imagination is illustrated through the head icon at the top. To make a musical imagination come alive you need some kind of musical instrument which is represented through the blocks „sound synthesis“ and „musical interface“.
Encoding
Using your hands for example you have to „encode“ your musical imagination.
This code is received by the musical interface e.g. the piano which again triggers the „sound synthesis“. The reproduced sound is fed back to your ear. Your brain will compare the former musical imagination to the actually heard music. This can lead to the following three results:
a) The perceived sound matches the former musical imagination, everything is fine.
b) The perceived sound does positively surprise you. In that case your musical imagination is extended and your musical tool box becomes larger.
c) The perceived sound does not match your imagination: In that case you have to improve your encoding until case a) or b) are reached.
Or until you give up.
Our mission
Based on the model of Figure 1 the mission of Audanika is the following:
We want to create musical interfaces that reduce the coding process: We assume that the better a musical interface corresponds to the musical imagination the less coding is required. Less coding means a better musical progress, more time for musical ideas, less practicing, more making music. Our dream is that one day anyone will be able to express their own emotions musically.
We want to create musical interfaces that stimulate the musical imagination: A certain musical imagination can be the origin of a musical idea. Vice versa playing a new musical instrument can extend existing musical imaginations or create new ones. Our instruments shall have interfaces you have never seen before. By using them you are going to encounter completely new musical ideas.
We want to create musical interfaces that motivate to think about musical logic, to improvise and to compose: Active music creation stimulates the linkage of the left and right brain hemisphere. The reason for that is that music creation is both, an intuitive and creative activity on the one hand and a logic thinking process at the other. If a musical instrument‘s interface is logical, it will motivate to think about music. Instead of memorizing patterns you will understand relationships and make better musical decisions.
Ten years ago doing this would have been extremely hard if not possible. The interfaces of instruments at that time were strongly determined by physical or technical constraints. In most cases it was not possible to change the interface dynamically.
But today with the help of multitouch based tools we are free to design completely new musical interfaces. Tones can be arranged in a way that the geometry of the tones corresponds much more to what we actually feel.
In my next article I will start to give some insight into the tone layout of SoundPrism.
I love Audanika’s SoundPrism App. It’s one of my first-choices for musical dabbling when on the move.
My already strong respect for them has increased massively after reading their succinctly stated vision and mission statement above. It closely matches my goals to democratise and spread the joy of intuitive, innovative musical self-expression around the world.
