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The Pixilerations Festival continues in Providence through Sunday, part of the FirstWorks Providence Festival:

TheBox by Lyn Goeringer

Lyn Goeringer, who performs Friday night, appears in the video above to be playing a wooden box. (She later informed me it is a metal box.) The presence of a related video at YouTube of her playing a theremin led me to ask, "I feel as though I'm asking, 'Is there a little man in the radio?' but... is there a theremin inside Lyn Goeringer's Box?"

Lyn replied,

The answer is actually no. The box is merely a box. In this video, it is amplified with microphones only. The Theremin video was supplied simply because it pertained to last week's concert and was the only other performance I have online.

This week's performance with the box will be amplified object with processed sound, meaning that I take the sound 'live' from the box as I play it (the term used most often is "real-time", to denote that I didn't record the sound source before hand and am doing everything live in performance). Unlike the Theremin the box is more like a percussion instrument in that it requires physical contact to make the sounds. The box is completely sealed, and, it is really true that I found it in a garbage pile behind a building. I have no idea what is inside it, as it is is sealed on all sides.

Tonight at 8 at Grant Recital Hall, at the corner of Hope Street and Young Orchard Ave., there'll be a free Acousmatic (sound whose source is hidden) Concert of surround-sound computer music and visual experiments. Some of the performers have sites where you can sample their work: Jen-Kuang Chang, Arvid Tomayko-Peters, Aaron Acosta.

Wednesday night there's video at the Cable Car, and Friday and Saturday nights at 10 p.m., downtown in the URI Shepard Building Auditorium, electronic and interactive concerts. Lyn Goeringer performs Friday night with, among others, Jacob Richman (the link requires the latest QuickTime player), Hugo Solis and Butch Rovan.

Saturday night's performers include Arvid Tomayko-Peters again, Jon Christopher Nelson (mp3), Steven Kemper, Brian Knoth and Alessandro Cipriani. Cipriani cracked me up with this bit of animation:

Thanks to Maya Allison for gathering some of these links for me.

I had to educate myself to write this post. Musique concrète, credited to Pierre Schaeffer, was a forerunner of acousmatic music. Interestingly, it conceived of classical music as arising as an abstraction -- notes on a score, for instance -- and only later made real with an instrument. Musique concrète starts from real sounds and arranges or plays them. Modern recording equipment "fixes" the performance into a file, and acousmatic music is "performed" by loudspeakers.

I hope this week's performances will go up on YouTube soon -- the QuickTime .mov files don't get the distribution they deserve.

Related: 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube from the Guardian (UK).

Baez and Dylan at Newport, 1963; James Brown and Pavarotti sing 'This Is A Man's World', 2002; The Beatles Rooftop Concert, 1969; The Who and Hendrix equipment smashing, 1968; Stravinksy conducts the Firebird Lullaby Suite 1965; Jackson Pollock drip paints, 1951; Marlene Dietrich's screen test, 1929; Marlon Brando screen tests for Rebel Without a Cause, 1947; old movies and readings and more...

I'll add one more that's not on this list: George Gershwin performing his Rhapsody in Blue, Part 1 and Part 2, audio only, from a piano roll he recorded.

This link comes via Euan Semple's The Obvious; Euan also links to the Periodic Table Of Videos -- "Tables charting the chemical elements have been around since the 19th century - but this modern version has a short video about each one."

 Tags  acousmatic digital music music new media

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