Author Archives: ranjit

stone song walkthrough

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[video link]

sound sculpture for Caramoor’s Garden of Sonic Delights, installed at the Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase College, New York. The sound changes slowly as the stones settle, and also responds to the weather.

The sound art festival’s opening at Caramoor on June 7th, and Stone Song will have a reception at SUNY Purchase on June 20th.

gardenofsonicdelights.org
www.caramoor.org

short ride in a fast chihuahua

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Here’s a nice recording of Short Ride in a Fast Chihuhua, performed live (by a toy chihuahua) at the Qubit Machine Music festival in February.

And here’s a video of another performance (also recorded at Qubit).

Short Ride in a Fast Chihuahua from ranjit on Vimeo.

About Short Ride in a Fast Chihuahua:

My toy dog always barks 26 times in a row. I asked composers to contribute microscores for piano, each 26 beats long, to be synchronized to the chihuahua’s voice. Fifteen composers wrote about sixty scores, which were performed by the mechanical dog at the Qubit Machine Music festival at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in New York in February 2014.

Composers: Ranjit Bhatnagar, Jason Charney, RP Collier, Langdon Crawford, Christi Denton, Rachael Forsyth, Ben Houge, Lem Jay Ignacio, Bryan Jacobs, James Joslin, Ari Lacenski, Tony Marasco, Kala Pierson, Erik Satie (adapted by Ranjit Bhatnagar), Isaac Schankler, and Schuyler Thum.

what you should do today (thursday february 27)

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Terry Dame’s Weird Wednesdays – on Thursday!  Terry’s wonderful monthly series of odd and fantastic music has moved to Thursday, and I’ll be joining her today, Thursday Feb 27 at 8pm, at Barbès in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with special guest Margaret Leng Tan.  Margaret and I will show our latest collaboration – I’ve taken some of her amazing METROGRAND sculptures, tiny grand pianos each made by cutting and folding a single Metrocard subway pass, and added tiny sound synthesizers to them to make them into playable instruments.  And we’ll have selections from John Cage’s Indeterminacy, played on Speak-and-Play, my speech synthesizer for pianists.  Plus, I’ll show and try to play a bunch of instruments and failed instruments from my Instrument-a-Day project, and my little toy dog will perform Short Ride in a Fast Chihuahua, a new piece with 60 compositions contributed by 16 composers, each piece just 4 seconds long.  BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!  Terry Dame will play on her invented instruments, the Horn of Plenty Sounds and the Parisian Hammer.  All this for a suggested donation of $10, tomorrow night at Barbès, 376 9th Street (corner of 6th Av & 9th St) in Brooklyn!  Here’s the facebook event if you’re into that sort of thing.

Hey look, here’s some video teasers!

video: 7-key metrogrand

video: chihuahua teaser

contraptionAlso! Exquisite Contraption opens at Flux Factory on Thursday.  I’ve joined the mad geniuses of Flux Factory in putting together a giant chain reaction machine that threads through their entire building.  The show opens at 6pm, so in theory you could go see the contraption and still make it back to Brooklyn for Weird Wednesday!  But I won’t hold it against you if you don’t. Will the big ramshackle collaborative machine work? Will it turn against its masters?  Go and find out!  If you can’t make the opening, you can see the contraption almost any time by appointment.  That’s 6pm at Flux Factory, 39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, Queens NY.  Of course there’s a facebook event for this too.