side 1: 9, 14
9: Bill Fontana Landscape Sculpture with Foghorns
This recording is from the Pier 1, Fort Mason Center (San Francisco), version (c/o KQED-fm). At the site, listeners walked along the 600 foot pier towards Angel Island. At the end of the pier, all of San Francisco Bay is visible. For 300 feet of this walk, listeners would pass under a sequence of eight loudspeakers. Each of these played a live broadcast of ambient sounds from each of eight different and distant microphone locations around San Francisco Bay.
All these locations can hear various combinations of the same foghorns. Because of the distance sound must travel between microphones, a complex configuration of echo patterns and sound delays was created and acoustically mixed in real time with fog horn sounds that were part of the normal ambience of Pier 1.
14: Jim Pomeroy from Mozart's Moog
A suitcase fitted with an 'eighteenth-century synthesizer,' comprised of 49 prepared music boxes, electronically amplified and recorded at Mills College in 1979. 'He deflates hi-tech and today's obsession wit it by bringing technology down to the level of folklore.' 'Includes many famous or popular tunes, some prepared beyond repair...'
side 2: 8, 9, 17, 18
8: Bart Hopkins from Disorderly Tumbling Forth A new musical keyboard instrument. 'Each key is connected to a rectangular framework in which hang eight lengths of copper pipe, all tuned to the appropriate pitch for that key. Striking a key one produces a continuous stream of tones, so that the many individual sounds can overlap to create the effect of a glittering sustain.' Bart edits the journal, Experimental Music Instruments.
9: Susan Stone from House With A View
Susan is a sound artist and producer who is developing a form of radio art she describes as 'Cinema in the head.' Through a migration across the diverse identities of radio -- as information source, as music box, as portal to another world -- she explores new territory of radiophonic play. House is '...a home movie constructed from the dreams, confessions, lullabies and most intimate monologues of an unusual assortment of residents found throughout the HOUSE'.
17: Peter Richards & George Gonzalez from Wave Organ
A permanent installation conceived by Richards and located at the end of a breakwater at Marina Yacht Harbor in San Francisco. The Wave Organ is an instrument played by tidal forces. Sounds are created by bay waters moving in and out of a series of pipes of varied lengths mounted along the water's edge. The volume of air that each pipe encloses determines the resonant or base frequency of that pipe. As the water moves up and down the pipe, it diminishes or enlarges the air column inside, so changing the resonant frequency.
The sounds are then vented in a series of stone patios. A garden atmosphere of granite and marble terraces was created by George Gonzalez utilizing materials found on the site (including headstone fragments form a disintered cemetery). Gonzalez likes to think of the Wave Organ a '...a temple to Poseidon, a listening station for the voices undersea.'
18: Paul DeMarinis & David Behrman from Sound Fountain
Sound Fountain was the first multi-player interactive music and video game. it allowed up to six people at a time to cooperatively make four-channel electronic music and color video graphics. It was designed to be played easily by persons with or without musical training on six touch sensitive wands that control music-generating and video parameters. By touching the instruments, players could change such features as the rhythm, tempo, and timbre of the music as well as create and control the video graphic creatures who dance across the screen. The game was devised to be collective and non-competitive, its rules being intuitive and its reward being participation in a lively ensemble experience.
Typed by C. Vega 2-6-96