Playing around with the ebassoon, which uses a simple network of dividers to derive a just-intonation scale from a single master tone.
ebassoon demo
5
Author Archives: ranjit
my favorite 3 seconds…
Misericordiam at the DUMBO Arts Festival
The lobby at 55 Washington was a perfect setting for the accordion robot, with its brushed steel walls and blue neon.
city birds at myrtle festival, sunday sept 18
Meet the birds at the Move About Myrtle festival on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn- tomorrow, September 19th!
They’ll also be at the NYC Resistor table at the World Maker Faire in Queens the next weekend (Sept 25-26).
The Case of the Curious Pedestrian at the Move About Myrtle Festival
that’s all!
Just the little “that’s all!” from the ends of a bunch of Annette Hanshaw tunes.
download link
upcoming stuff
Some upcoming events that I’m involved with:
- July 29-31 (Thursday-Saturday) Odd Act presents Peter Pan at the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts, Princeton, NJ
- They’ve borrowed a bunch of my homemade instruments for this musical adaptation of Peter Pan. I’ll be there for the Thursday night show!
- September 19 (Sunday noon-6pm) Move About Myrtle Festival along Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, between Clermont Ave & Hall St.
- The Case of the Curious Pedestrian is a one-day exhibition of performance art and ephemeral installations as part of the Myrtle neighborhood festival. I’ll be hiding a bunch of little mechanical music machines along (above) the avenue- can you find them all?
- August 2010-June 2011 Wind through the Trees – an outdoor sculpture exhibition of sound & motion at Jenkins Arboretum, Devon, PA
- I’ve got two pieces in this show of environmental and kinetic sculpture – good old Trumpet Marine and a new one, Spiracles, that’ll twist its way all the way up into the treetops. The opening party will be the evening of Saturday October 2.
- September 23-26 Festival of Music for People and Thingamajigs, Oakland, CA.
- This year I’m helping to curate this festival of handmade instruments and alternate tunings, but I’ll probably have some sort of noisemaker in there too!
- January 20-30, 2011 Pulse Art and Technology Festival, Telfair Museum of Art,, Savannah, GA
- I’ll be conducting some instrument-building workshops, and possibly performing. Don’t know the exact dates yet.
- January 24-February 25, 2011 Artistic Mediums at the New Art Center, Newton, MA.
- My sound and micro-radio installation Songs from the Portugese will be part of this exhibit about mysterious phenomena and things that go bump in the night
…and maybe some other stuff.
video: making an accordion automaton, in a hurry
Motherboard tv was kind enough to ask me to make a music machine for them. Here’s their video of the process!
noise carnival composer's guide
Noise Carnival is my sound sculpture/music machine with Nick Yulman, permanently installed at Coney Island USA – Coney Island’s combination history & art museum, sideshow, and bar.
The machine has three parts, though we may add more in the future: a bass guitar, a xylophone, and a percussion section. I recently wired it up to play a short tune whenever someone drops a coin into nearby donation funnel. As you add more coins, it adds more layers to the tunes.
We want to invite composers to create new original mini-tunes for the machine. Here’s information about how to write music for Noise Carnival! We’re also interested in proposals for live performances incorporating the machine – all the parts can be played live through midi.
vexbot survived!
My little toy piano robot survived about 20 straight hours of playing “Vexations” (see previous coverage). Though I did find a few retaining nuts in the bottom of the case that had been shaken loose by all the vexing. You can see & hear an excerpt from the performance on ustream.
I spent a few hours listening to the audio streams from both the robot performance and the human Vexations marathon in Seattle. It was kind of eerie and kind of comforting. What was it like? Like this: [19 minute mp3]
The human and robot performances were mentioned in Seattle’s weekly, The Stranger, here and here.
five years of samson
I adopted my dog 5 years ago today.
Bonus blingee from Lia!
