I just saw an article on Make: called Felix’s Machines. An artist named Felix Thirn created this extraordinary mechanical musical instrument.
I did a little bit of research and found a couple video examples of his work in progress.
You can see and hear the evolution of the devices and musical compositions that the South London based artist is creating.
Felix’s Machines August 24, 2008
Felix’s Machines November 19, 2007
Kanta Horio’s recent installation at the Spark Festival consisted of a room with a dozen or more sound making mechanisms suspended by wires. One of the mechanisms was a metal teapot with a magnet traversing its circumference. When I asked Kanta how this was achieved, he graciously removed the lid from the teapot and showed me an internal motor rotating another magnet just inside the inner surface. With some good luck and a bit of patience I was able to get a few minutes alone in the room and capture some of the fascinating sounds that his piece was producing. Please note that no loud speakers were used in Kanta’s piece. This recording is a snapshot of the acoustic sound produced by the mechanisms involved.
Kanta Horio Sounds
This year’s Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts starts on Tuesday, February 17 and goes through Sunday, February 22 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Festival features dozens of accomplished artists, performers, and speakers from around the globe. The content ranges from the experimental, electronic sounds of STEIM to the glitch, minimal dub of Stefan Betke, aka Pole.
My group, Keston and Westdal featuring Graham O’Brien on drums, are appearing at the festival on Thursday, February 19, 2009 at the Bedlam Theatre. We will be performing works based on material from our 2008 collection of experimental compositions, One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). The concert is free and open to the public, ages 18 and up. Here’s Upward Not Northward from our last album. You might notice an abrupt ending on this piece because it’s taken from a gapless master.
Upward Not Northward
Here’s another segment from the live recording I wrote about in the last entry. This is an excerpt from the piece Some Kind of Adhesive from One Day to Save All Life (2008, Unearthed Music). If you are familiar with the piece you will probably notice that this excerpt bares little resemblance to the original recording.
This is an example of how far a piece can stray from it’s original structure. The tempo hasn’t changed and some of the same instrument recordings are used, but these elements have been shaped into something new by cutting, stretching, looping, processing, and other forms of manipulation in real-time during the performance. This makes every set different from the next and keeps things interesting for us and (hopefully) our listeners.
Some Kind of Adhesive Live Mix (Excerpt)
To create this sound I started by programming a beat. In this case I pitched each slice of the beat individually to create a variety of pitches in the loop. Once I was satisfied with it I rendered it to a clip and applied a plugin by Paul Kellett (MDA) called Tracker, distributed by smartelectronix. Tracker tracks the frequency of a sample with a waveform, such as a sine wave, and then allows you to transpose, slide between pitches, adjust the mix and so on.
Running drums through Tracker can create some interesting and unpredictable melodies. At the start of this clip I left the mix at 100%, only hearing the melody created by the pitches tracked, then adjusted it down to zero by the end so you can hear what the beat sounds like without the pitch tracking. In front of Tracker I added Beat Repeat and turned it on a couple of times to generate some fills. I touched it up with some tempo delay mixed in here and there for some dub flavor.
Illuminator Console