Acoustic Occurrences (2011)

 The project is about using acoustic sounds in live electronic music. Normally electronic music is played via speaker systems, but I have always had this feeling that a speaker introduces some sort of artificial distance to the music. It may be related to the concepts of extension/amputation that McLuhan talks about in Understanding Media; the extensions of man. With computers all kinds of sounds can be created and somehow the magic of the early electroacoustic pursuits of unheard sounds has faded. So as a reaction to that this project explores the use of acoustic sound sources in an otherweise electronic music live setup. In the picture you can see the system with 24 objects (wine glasses, metal brackets etc.) used as soundsources. A solenoid with a lever is triggered from maxMSP using a Arduino board as interface to tap the objects. The maxMSP patch is a 20-step sequencer with some tempo features and patterns are plotted live and altered over time. The outcome are simple rythmic/melodic structures reminding of some early minimalist works from Reich and Glass.

The project was realised with support from Danish Composers Society/KODA’s funds for social and cultural purposes.