Thinkdance | The Field Guide

Thanks to Eric Hardiman for shooting and posting videos from Saturday’s Albany Sonic Arts Collective show.

This is the premiere of a soon-to-be-titled work built around the idea of treating a fader box as a set of pump organ pedals, rather than simple position sensors. Using Cycling ’74’s Max I can control the organ sounds with a variety of gestures: “pumping” the faders makes the sounds louder, rhythmic motion creates harmonics, sudden and abrupt changes add distortion and bite. The samples that appear at 5:30 are from a 2010 recording session with choreographer Jill Sigman (previous story here).

(Start at 1:32 to skip the embarrassing banter and the hopeless yet obligatory banjo tuning…)

“No Mule” is another brand-new tune. The rhythmic chopping effect is a kind of slow-motion walk through a live sample of the banjo. I add a few more live samples beginning at about 4:00 and get into full-on Steve Reich mode by 6:00.

I recently had the opportunity to help Kristin Norderval build a hemispherical speaker for use in the jill sigman/thinkdance production, Our Lady of Detritus, engagingly described as “a portable, interdisciplinary performance installation about trash and transcendence; a traveling grassroots campaign fueled by experimentation, green energy sources and community interaction.” The show is presented every weekend through mid-October at various locations around New York City. See here for details.

The speaker was based on the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) Delorean speaker and the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) speakers.

Enclosure

We used an Ikea salad bowl for the enclosure just like the SLOrk speakers.

Amps

We pulled 3 Dayton T-amps from their enclosures and mounted them on the inside of the bottom plate of the speaker cabinet.

Speakers

We used 6 4″ Inifinity 4022i drivers.

Volume Pots and Connectors

The Dayton amps had combination volume and power pots, so we decided to keep them rather than source and wire up a 6-position potentiometer. A little Dremel routing magic made mounting the volume pots easier than I expected. A coaxial power jack and 6-pin Neutrik XLR jack and plug rounded out the connectors.