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Notes: David Dunn workshop: Santa fe NM
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
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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
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