The Automatic Trio

Tom Moore is a musician playing traditional music, contemporary acoustic music and sound art. He’s primarily a violinist, but also plays other instruments and works with assorted electronics and hardware.

For his latest performance “Automatic Trio”, Tom performs with simple “kinetic” or animatronic instruments which play themselves. By attaching a bow to a simple bicycle wheel, he’s able to simulate the bowing of a violin or cello, making for some automated accompanyment to Tom’s playing. The set-up is quite simple, but really works with the ambient string loops and improvisation that he’s playing over the droning of the mechanical instruments. The fact that it’s part “installation piece”, part performance makes for something that is also visually compelling.

Wall Street Sound Machine

Steven White is an visual artist from Ontario. White got the idea to convert old argicultural machines into a collection of fanciful kinetic sculptures when he and his wife moved to rural Ontario, and found a lot of obsolete equipment there. Sprockets, gears and valves on many of the pieces are interactive, and when you crank them, the sculptures produce an eerie, mechanical kind of music.

Wall Street Sound Machine is an interactive, kinetic sculpture made from an old metal roofing vent, a cast-iron wheel, gears, steel, guitar strings and a large hand-lithographed Wall St. sign. The sounds produced are dissonant and somewhat random, echoing the look of the Wall Street sign; corroded, abandoned, broken, oily and wrong. Inspired by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, this piece highlights the underside of big commerce, showing the obsolete, broken aspects of a system that is in need of change.

Self Organizing Still-Life

I’m intrigued by this Self Organizing Still-Life created by David Fried. Once in a while I find out about a project that is so simple, yet so ingenious, I wish I’d come up with it myself. 

These perfectly round spheres are set in motion by sound waves, through the level object they rest upon. The movement of each sphere can never be predicted, and they al move around in some sort of random choreography. There are more examples to be found on David’s website. 

Rainlith 2.0

Rainlith 2.0 captures the movement of the audience and reacts to this by moving it’s large rain-stick around. The sound of the stick is processed in real-time and fed back to the room via speakers. The nice thing about this kinetic sound installation is how it combines the acoustic sound of the rain-stick with electronic sounds, blending together both sound worlds.

The installation, created by Rui Gato, is located in an old grain silo, which seems to be like a perfect situation for a piece like this, as the sounds blend together perfectly, due to the acoustic properties of the silo.

186 prepared dc-motors, cardboard boxes

Another wonderful installation by Zimoun, this time created using 186 prepared dc-motors, cardboard boxes 60x60x60cm, apparently this is also the title of this sound installation. The audience can use their imagination.

If you have not done so already, be sure to also read Zimoun’s answers to the Five Sound Questions, and while you’re at it, the included video gives a nice overview of his work. His work can be seen at upcoming events in Venezuela, Switzerland, Germany, Estonia, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States.

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Piano Migrations Installation

For her Piano Migrations Installation, Kathy Hinde took the inside of an old upright piano and transformed it into a kinetic sound and video installation. The projected birds seem to excite the strings as they fly by and sit on them. 

The twitching and fluttering of small machines, fastened to the piano, touch the strings and cause them to resonate. The image is analyzed by the controlling software to make sure only the string closest to the moving bird is heard.

Waves by Daniel Palacios

Waves is a wonderful installation created by Daniel Palacios. Using just a piece of elastic string, spun around by two electro motors, the most wonderful waveforms are shown, from simple sine wave patterns to complex smoke-like images, moving lines woven together, floating in the air:

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