Howled on Their Knees by David Matthews

Howled on Their Knees was Turner’s Senior Composition Thesis and funded by Ohio University’s 2013-14 Provost’s Undergraduate Research Fund. He built and invented all of the instruments used in the recital. The instruments include a four-octave steel plate marimba, a four-octave EMT pipe marimba, a two-and-a-half-octave copper glockenspiel, multiple whirly tubes on three separate ceiling fans controlled by dimmer switches, and three string instruments called the "Turner Winch."

The composition challenges the cultural expectation of sound. By using non-standard instruments, Turner created a new experience for listeners by insisting that there are more interesting, legitimate, and beautiful sounds to be found and created.

The work was premiered by Turner’s percussion trio, Triangulus, which consists of Eli Chambers, D. Turner Matthews, and Jacob Schlaerth.

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Yaybahar by Görkem Şen

Yaybahar is an electric-free, totally acoustic instrument designed by Gorkem Sen. The vibrations from the strings are transmitted via the coiled springs to the frame drums. These vibrations are turned into sound by the membranes which echo back and forth on the coiled springs. This results in an unique listening experience with an hypnotic surround sound.

What you hear in this performance is captured in realtime without any additional effects and with no post audio processing.

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Hauschka prepared piano

Super-magnets, art erasers, rubber tubing, Tic-Tac boxes, ping-pong balls, duct tape, aluminium foil, leather straps, marbles, and vibrating sex toys: these are just a few of the assorted oddities that German musician Hauschka uses to create his singular sound on prepared piano. With a career that’s taken him from German hip-hop to drum-n-bass, Hauschka’s music challenges the perceived boundaries between high and low culture, having appeared at festivals alongside the likes of Zomby and Dixon as well as touring with double Grammy-winning violinist Hilary Hahn.

His newest LP Abandoned City was made entirely on the piano, utilizing disruptive methods to alter the timbre, sustain, and reverb. The results are by turns lush and oppressive, exposing new melodic colours and percussive undertones on repeated listens. There are plenty of surprising details that make you question how one man can wring so much variety from a single piano.

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Mechanical Techno by Graham Dunning

Originally a studio project for making recordings, I now also perform live using the Mechanical Techno method. Several looping records spin on the same axle, ensuring they stay approximately in time with each other. I layer up locked groove records, audio triggers to analogue sytnhs, mechanically played percussion such as a cowbell or a cymbal, and mechanically triggered drum machines. I take all these inputs and perform a live dub, mixing down to two channels live in one take.

Lee Scratch Perry described Dub as "the ghost in me coming out" – Using Mechanical Techno set-ups I aim to release the Ghost in the Machine. Each set-up is unique. The technique is inherently clumsy and delicate, leading to frequent and multiple mistakes and accidents. The chance elements and unpredictable aspects lead to compositions I would never think to deliberately make.

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Cocoquantus by Ciat-Lonbarde

The COCOQUANTUS is a TUBE through which YOU SQUEEZE your JELLY_ASS, meaning the sonic material you give it.

Ultimately this is about your material. Singing is quite appropriate to the custom preamps, as well as dry, woody, or reedy piezo sounds. The Synthin is optimized for Sidrazzi input, and compensated to allow the ultrasound frequencies to go straight into the heart of the delay, there creating difference tones and thus revealing the heterodyne bat-ghosts lurking there.

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The Fractal Harp

The new prototype features a 28-string pivoting slide harp/guitar ergonomically fused with a 5-string bass guitar, midi keyboard and other elements, bringing the ability to produce fully realized music in real time. It's a combined, updated descendant of the Swiss Army Bass, The Egotar and The original Fractal Harp.

The Harp: The player’s right hand controls the pivoting slide/bridge while simultaneously picking, plucking and effecting pitch and modulation. The slide brings the harp's relative notes and scales through exponentially fluid chromatic increments. Additionally, a foot pedal acts independently on specific harp strings in order to bend/manipulate pitch and intervals in a way reminiscent of a pedal steel guitar. Single or two-handed play is possible and allow for the simultaneous playing of other instruments manipulation and effects.

The harp uses standard electric guitar strings with a 14 inch wide custom built pickup mounted close to the upper bridge.

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Biocomputer Music by Eduardo R Miranda

Biocomputer Music is a composition for piano and biocomputer. The biocomputer is an unprecedented musical machine built in my research laboratory at ICCMR (Plymouth University) based on programmable organisms cultured on circuit boards, and which are capable of growing their own circuits. This movie introduces the research behind this technology and the musical ideas that motivated the composition.

Slime mold as musical partner.

"Triptik" by ProtoPixel and Tigrelab

TripTik is an interactive installation that uses lighting as the main mean of representation. By combining LED strips and projection techniques, we have created 3 multi-layer lighting structures. In this manner frontal, diffuse and indirect lighting are combined with video mapping to create a deep and expressive canvas to represent movement, music and nature.

TripTik presents two modes. A first interactive mode allow users to control the installation by plunging their hands in a pan of water. In this way, users can create lighting patterns and music chords as they move their fingers in the water. The second mode presents an audiovisual choreography that recreates a landscape that strains through three windows and filters inside the space generating an immersive scene.

ProtoPixel and Tigrelab

"Form Follows Sound" by Roy Yahalomi

"Form Follows Sound" is Roy Yahalomi’s graduation project from the Holon Institute of Technology. The work is based on the research of a new ceramic material that the designer developed together with Or Hetzroni. The element is made out of basalt rocks, which needed to be ground into a powder and transformed to liquid. Afterwards, plaster molds were shaped providing a cavern where the substance was poured.

The natural gravel is made from different types of metal and glass, ingredients that provide its unique acoustic qualities. this fact fascinated Yahalomi, leading him to perform studies in search of answers to multiple questions: "Do different shapes of the material affect the sound? In which ways does sound move inside a shape? What are the conditions required for producing a sound? And if so, is it possible to determine the pitch every shape will produce?" With his insights, a template was formed explaining the needed capacities and thicknesses for a series of 20 bells with harmonic sounds. The device is a contemporary interpretation of the traditional African Guiro.

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Bizet's "Carmen" by Zic Zazou

Zic Zazou has for thirty years been a band whose core aim has been to strike a balance between street art and stage-show, providing a steady, skilfully-blended stream of music, poetry and humour.

Nine musicians, comedians, singers, all playing a variety of different instruments some traditional, some used in unconventional and imaginative ways and some of which are pure invention. Their art has taken them into the realms of traditional Beaux Arts brass band music, recycled punk, hybrid musette/funk rock and into art involving a hotchpotch of musical objects.

And also "La marche nuptiale"...



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"Les Oiseaux de Céleste" by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Exhibit at the Barbican Curve gallery, London (27 February to 23 May 2010). Filmed by Ariane Michel.

Springboard by Eric Leonardson

An intimate performance demonstration of Eric Leonardson’s Springboard, a self-built instrument made from coil springs, wood, and other everyday objects, amplified by a single piezo-electric contact microphone. Its diverse and unusual sounds belie its humble origins. Leonardson built the Springboard in 1994 and has since performed with many artists locally, nationally, and internationally.

Joshua Baum shot and edited this video at Amherst College in 2013.

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webX0X

Drumbeats in your browser.

steel pan drum by Michael Perkins

Michael Perkins, owner of FancyPans Steel Drums in Eugene, OR demonstrates how to make a steel pan drum, condensed to 2 minutes. Perkins transforms a hollow barrel into a beautiful instrument, using the building and tuning techniques of Trinidadian steel drum master, Ellie Manette.

PVC instrument by Max Damen and Bram Vrancken

Playing "He's a Pirate".

"Chladni Singing" by Meara O'Reilly

A work in progress by Meara O'Reilly, film by Lisa Foti-Straus. Salt is scattered on a metal plate electronically driven and sung into. Songs are written based on sequences of patterns in the salt.

Chladni patterns were discovered by Robert Hook and Ernst Chladni in the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that when they bowed a piece of glass covered in flour, (using an ordinary violin bow), the powder arranged itself in resonant patterns according to places of stillness and vibration. Today, Chladni plates are often electronically driven by tone generators and used in scientific demonstrations. With carefully sung notes and a transducer driving the plate, I'm able to explore the same resonances. Songs are then written based on sequences of patterns and their associated frequencies. An adaptation of this project was developed as a permanent exhibit for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA. It debuted in 2013.

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"Hit the Beat" by Lorenzo Bravi

Hit the Beat is a physical drum machine that can play everything, making it possible for everyday objects to become actual musical instruments. Anyone can build an orchestra-like set of items, thus marking the beginning of an intuitive and fully interactive investigation of music and sound. The machine is based on an Arduino platform acting as the translator of a message in midi format, which triggers a physical solenoid percussion. This project started off as a workshop for children at Libreria Corraini 121, in Milan.

We've seen how any object can be made into a trigger... this is the reverse... trigger any object for sound!

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"Music from Nature" by Diego Stocco

To celebrate Earth Day 2012 Burt's Bees asked me to create a video performance in the style of my Music from a Tree. To expand the concept I also included as "instruments" some of the ingredients used in their products, like honey, almonds, rice, and coconuts; also bees had a musical role in this piece. I performed the whole composition by playing these natural elements, no synthesizers, samplers or additional sounds have been used.

Diego Stocco is a California-based sound designer and composer.

Long String Instrument by Ellen Fullman

Live at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley CA on November 18, 2011. With Jason Hoopes (contrabass) and Gino Robair (percussion).

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Ohm Handpan instrument

Hang drum, hand pan, tongue drum... whatever you call them, these instruments have become very popular. This promo video from Ohm Handpan demonstrates the sound. This interview with makers Dave Beery and Stevan Morris is also of interest.