Microtonal Wall

1500 speakers, each playing it’s own microtonal frequency, collectively spanning four octaves. That’s what Tristan Perich’s Microtonal Wall is. For some reason I thought I’d posted it before, but I hadn’t. The work of Tristan Perich has been quite a fascination for me, ever since he made his “1-bit music”;  an electronic circuit assembled inside a CD case with a headphone jack on the side, playing back 40 minutes of lo-fi 1-bit electronic music, the lowest possible digital representation of audio. Microtonal Wall expands on this very clean idea by confronting you with 1500 individual 1-bit noisemakers, playing all at once.

The beauty of Microtonal Wall is that when viewed from a distance it seems like noise, but when inspecting the installation by taking a closer look reveals that the noise is actually made up of individual frequencies.

It’s a very simple idea, but a very strong one. Noise is something which exists in our minds only- we just can’t keep track of all the different things happening at once, so it becomes “noise”. By being able to physically focus on one aspect, you’re able to experience that in this installation.

Vuvuzela Filter

Today I spoke with a colleague about the removal of the sound of those vuvuzelas during the world cup football broadcasts. It should not be that hard to build a vuvuzela filter, as the majority of the humming (that sounds like a swarm of bees from a distance) is tuned to B-flat. Of course, I was not the first one thinking of this. 

Many TV-watchers complain, but who are we to ban this African tradition? Adding a filter should not be very difficult, and indeed it is not: the German Tobias Herre created a simple tutorial on how to set up a multi band equalizer in Logic Express to filter out the unwanted frequencies. Be sure to check out the included sound examples. The vuvuzelas are completely gone!

Read the article (translated from German by Google) here.

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