Number Made Audible
Named in tribute to Fluxus-founder George Maciunas, the Maciunas Ensemble's Number Made Audible stands as one of the most radical documents of sound art to emerge from the Netherlands in the 1990s. Originally released by Het Apollohuis in 1993, this CD captures eleven pieces that transform numerical relationships into living sound through invented instruments: Duochords, Spring Strings, Musical Bows, Guitars with Tails, Tubular Aluminum Monochords.
Founded in 1968 by Paul Panhuysen, Remko Scha a…
Music on a long thin wire
First released on Lovely Music in 1980, Music on a Long Thin Wire is a classic example of Alvin Lucier's investigations into the physics of sound and the sonic properties of natural processes. A 50-foot length of taut wire passes through the poles of a large magnet and is driven by an oscillator; the vibrations of the wire are miked at either end, amplified and broadcast in stereo. The thin wire is set vibrating four times at four different frequencies; what results is not the low drone one migh…
Maritime Rites
Featuring the foghorns and other maritime sounds of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and solo improvisations by John Cage, Joseph Celli, Clark Coolidge, Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Malcolm Goldstein, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, and Leo Smith "In the middle 1970s I began to formulate ideas and projects leading to the making of music outside the concert halls-often in large open and naturally beautiful sites. Ports, rivers, lakes, caves, quarries, fields, and woods, always ready sources of …
Hora Harmonica
"Hora Harmonica," realized in 1983 at the Pietro Grossi S 2F M (Studio di fonologia musicale di Firenze), is not a proper piece of music, but conceptual art inspired by the physics of sound. Albert Mayr proposes a harmonic clock, a model of non-linear time.. “When we slow down a sound many times, all the way below 15 cps approximately, we perceive as a series of discrete pulses. In a physical sense it remains a sound, but not for human perception. Try now to imagine an extremely slow 'sound' whe…