I went to see a concert that a friend of mine in the music department held over the weekend and had my mind kind of blown. It featured traditional marimba and percussion, as well as a "new" musical instrument--the Air Marimba. Using motion sensors, Levy created an instrument that was "playable"--in the sense of a traditional instrument (and not in some John Cage-ian way) by picking up the motions of one's hands.
If that wasn't enough, after the intermission he and another musician (?) played "electronic" music. Levy put his percussion skills to use and his collaborator manipulated a sound board. The most mind-blowing piece had Levy scraping, pounding, and finding new sounds by using a butter knife and student ID against a tabletop. I'm assuming that the electronic "box" was hooked up to some kind of sensor underneath the table that picked up vibration? No matter how it worked, it was pretty psychadellic, dude!
Levy Lorenzo
Air Marimba, 2010
Rosewood, Infrared Distance Sensors, Microcontrollers, Embedded Software
The marimba is one of the oldest and simplest musical instruments. It is played by using a mallet to strike differently sized wooden bars to respectively produce different tones. Reminiscent of a traditional marimba, the Air Marimba is a new electronic musical instrument which is played by manipulating the air above two rosewood bars.
The Air Marimba can exist in installation mode and concert mode. In a gallery exhibit, the viewer is invited to play and explore the instrument but will only have a limited range of musical expressions that he or she can play. However, compositions or improvisations can be performed on the the Air Marimba in a concert setting by a musician who has spent significant time practicing and understanding the instrument's technique.
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