Notes: David Dunn workshop: Santa fe NM

[derek <derek@xxxxxxx>]

dear list,

these DO NOT come from me, but rather from a friend Bob Schrei, 
rjschrei@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, who was kind enough to take notes for me during 
the workshop.

enjoy,
derek

------------------------------

the first day we spent a good part of the day listening to and 
discussing the history of sound art. Brush, Altoff, Monahan, Schwitters, 
Voice Crack,Russolo, Lockwood, Chopin, Mann, DeMarinis, Giorno, Beckett, 
Gaburo, etc. no big surprises but a great re-cap and new info for  most. 
then we spent a lot of time listening to some exorcism field recordings 
from germany. he had about 60 hours of these recordings. david is 
interested in glossalalia, speaking in tongues, and the whole field of 
phonetics and formants. listened to a piece he did based on the phonems 
from the gospel of st. thomas. talked about phonems alot. 80 phonems 
make up all languages etc. david is a real hardware and programming 
geek. started with fortran etc. so we heard a good rant about the 
superiority of pc over mac for sound art, shocking a few of the 
musicians and audio technicians that were there, all pro tool users.

then we spent most of the rest of the day looking , listening and 
playing with a wide variety of transducers. using lasers as transducers, 
using various piezo elements , made a hydrophone and contact mic out of 
piezo elements used as greeting card speakers....$1.00 spanish greeting 
cards made in china......he said these hydrophones are as good as 
$100.00 contact mics and $200.00 hydrophones. its what he has used for 
all of his hydrophonic recordings. simply remove the piezo elements, dip 
them in plastic dip, heat shrink seal the connections and your off to 
your nearest body of water.

the next day we started off looking at the soft ware that david uses 
mostly..... he showed us a visual score that he did for an hour long 
piece in Coagula and we listened to the piece. a beautiful piece and a 
very skillful use of coagula. one of his favorites as one of his 
interests is synethesia, i was very impressed with both the piece and 
his mastery of this compositional technique. i had no idea that such 
sophisticated work could be done with this little piece of freeware. a 
real eyeopener, no pun intended. he also did a visual score using nasa 
photos of the density on light on planet earth at night. he mostly uses 
cool edit pro, audiomulch, reaktor, and coagula. he showed us a reaktor 
ensemble that has taken two years of work, which is what i mentioned in 
the post. it sits in the environment and interacts with the natural 
world, creating these feed back loops with the birds , and frogs, and 
animals of the swamp and records and mixes everything into the finised 
piece. it is the most sophisticated reaktor ensemble i have ever seen, 
which was also inspiring. way beyond anything i could imagine, but then 
thats his specialty.

then we delved into microphones.... he uses sennheiser NKH series. he 
had all of them. expensive.  but his chosen favorites. a must for good 
field recordings in his mind. the next lowest in price and quality is 
the Crown stereo PZM, SASS P_MK2, at about $700.00. it runs on 2 9volt 
batteries. thats all he recommends for serious field recording. the 
lowest would be sennheiser bi-naural, their best...we looked at all 
kinds of other mics and their specific qualities, but he kept going back 
to the sennheisers. we made an optical theremin, ring modulator and 
spring reverb unit. spent the afternoon doing hardware hacking...taking 
apart phones, answering machines, all kinds of  toys, including cheep 
samplers, and just rewiring hacking them for other purposes. voice crack 
stuff. david does this with his students and then mics everthing and 
runs it through audiomulch for performing as as group. it was great fun.

----robert schrei

------------------------------