Hello to everyone, including those who’ve long been acquainted with Experimental Musical Instruments and those who are new to us. Here’s an update of goings-on at Experimental Musical Instruments as of January, 2010.
We sell piezo material in several forms for making musical instrument pickups. One form is cable, about a tenth of an inch in diameter. The piezo cable looks very much like regular shielded audio cable, but it’s got a very thin layer of piezo material inside which enables it to function as a contact pickup. It’s most often used in or under the bridge of string instruments, where it can respond very directly to the string vibrations.
For a typical guitar installation, you need a piece of cable about 5″ long to span the bridge with enough left over to make the necessary connections. But our customers have occasionally wondered: how much longer can a piece of piezo cable be, and still work well? Imagine for example that you’re making something like a clavichord or harpsichord; can you use a single piece of piezo cable several feet long to pick up the sound from the full length of the bridge?
I recently performed some tests to see how length affects the performance of the cable. Mind you, the tests were very rudimentary. I didn’t build harpsichords to test them in; I just cut pieces of the cable to various lengths and hooked them up to an amplifier. I tested and compared their outputs by wedging them under the strings of a guitar and plucking the strings. Here’s what I found.
Finding number one: Length doesn’t seem to be a problem. Long cables were about as responsive as short ones. The longest I tested was 48″, and the strength and quality of the response was not very different from that of a 5″ cable.
Finding number two: Regardless of length, the cables do not produce a very strong signal. Theoutput is less than that from the piezo films that we sell. (This wasn’t really news, but these tests confirmed it for me.) That leads to these two pieces of advice: 1) Piezo cable is best used in applications where it can be given strong vibrations to respond to (such as in-bridge installations). 2) In installations using piezo cable it’s especially important to make sure all wiring is well shielded, to provide the best available signal-to-noise ratio.
In spite of the lesser signal strength, plenty of customers have gotten back to me to report very successful applications with the cable.
Fuller Tone for Wind Chimes, Tubulons & Other Tubular Chimes
A few years ago Experimental Musical Instruments put out a book on making wind chimes. In that book I included a photo and a few words about a set of chimes in which the body of air enclosed in tube is tuned to resonate with the chime tone. This gives the chime a fuller and louder sound, particularly in low-pitched chimes. There’s a recording of a resonated chime set included on the audio CD that accompanies the book. I didn’t include a full description of how to make such a thing though; I was trying to keep the book simple and accessible, and I was afraid that a description of the air-tuning process would be too long and complicated. Since the book came out, a couple of readers have gotten in touch with me to say they loved the sound of that chime on the CD, asking why I didn’t give a good explanation for how to make it.
In response I’ve now written an article explaining the process. You can find it here.
A few months ago I posted information on how to make a pop gun. In that post I mentioned the closely related sound of suction pops, as in the sound of a cork pulled from a bottle. Pop gun pops and suction pops both are very cool and quirky sounds, but suction pops have one advantage: unlike with pop gun pops, the pitch is predictable. If you wish, you can make suction poppers tuned to particular notes.
In this post I’ll describe how to make suction poppers. Suction poppers and pop guns are quite similar in design, and you can use most of the same components to make either. If you happened to read the earlier pop-gun post, and especially if you made a pop gun, then most of the suction popper making procedure will be familiar to you.
Here’s a sketch showing the essentials of a suction popper.
To make the suction popper, start with the main tube. Plastic tubing, such as PVC conduit, is suitable, and it’s widely available and inexpensive at hardware stores. Other sorts of tubing can work as well. ¾” diameter or thereabouts is good, if only because it’s easy to find corks to fit. The length of this tube determines the popping pitch. I have made successful suction poppers in lengths ranging from about 10 inches for high pitches to a several feet for low pitches.*
The two corks should have the truncated cone shape, as shown. The narrow end should be narrow enough to go inside in the tube; the wide end too wide to fit. This type of cork can often be found in hobby or crafts stores, if you don’t have any already around.
The plunger cork must be cut to fit the inside of the tube snugly. To get a perfect fit, shove the cork into the tube as far as it can go without forcing it. Cut off the end that’s still sticking out, and sand the cut end flush with the tube end. This gives you your fitted cork; pop it back out by pushing from the inside with a dowel coming through the tube from the opposite end.
For the plunger stick, you can use any sort of dowel or stick fits inside the tube, about ten inches long. Use a nail or screw to attach the fitted plunger cork to one and as shown in the drawing. Pre-drill the cork to prevent splitting before putting the nail or screw through it, and if the nail or screw doesn’t have a large enough head, include a washer.
That’s it; the suction popper is now ready to play. Insert the plunger in one end of the tube, place the stopper cork on the opposite end, and pull the plunger back out with a rapid motion. If you’re ambitious, make more suction poppers in graduated lengths to create a scale. Gather a group of friends to play suction pop compositions and improvisations in hocketing style.
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*With longer tube lengths/lower notes, an unexpected effect comes into play: a prominent snap sound appears in the tone. I don’t know what causes this. You can hear the effect quite prominently in the sound sample on this page. The snapping on the low notes comes across almost like a distortion in the recording, but it’s actually part of the natural sound.
We sell a lot of piezo films, ready for our customers to wire them up as musical instrument pickups. In most applications, a single piezo film pickup is all that’s needed to capture an instrument’s sound. But there are also a lot of situations in which it’s useful to have two or three, and sometimes much larger numbers of piezo film pickups on a single instrument. (For example of an instrument calling for many, think of a xylophone-like instrument in which a pickup is needed on each bar.) The question arises: is it OK to have multiple piezos feeding into a single output? My response to this question, up until recently, has been based on book-learning and not on direct experience. So the other day I finally sat down and did a whole lot of piezo hook-ups in different configurations in order to see first-hand how many piezos you can wire together with good results.
In this posting I’ll first tell you what I learned in terms of numbers, then I’ll describe how I did the tests, and then I’ll provide additional how-to information for hooking up multiple piezos (including ideas for what to do if the number of piezos you need is too large for a single group) . But first let me review the basic information that was already known before I did my series of tests. The ideal situation is to have a single piezo element operating independently, sending its signal through a cable to its own amplifier input. It’s also possible to have two or more piezos wired together and going into the same input; however, the more piezos you have in the system, the weaker the signal from each piezo will be. The question to be answered is, how many separate piezos can you wire together before the loss becomes a problem?
I experimented with both the very small piezo films we sell (piezo “tabs,” they’re sometimes called) and the big 6″ ones. Here’s a rough summary of what I found.
RESULTS
1″ piezo tabs
With the tabs, I was happy to find that you can get away with more pickups in a group than I expected: the signal strength deteriorates as you add more piezos, but not as badly as I had feared. In the chart below, the numbers in the left column are the number of piezos wired together in a group; the comment on the right describes the resulting signal strength and quality.
1 Excellent
2-3 Almost no discernable loss
4-5 Very little loss
6-10 Increasingly noticeable loss, but still functional
10-20 Increasingly serious loss
Recommendation for multiple piezo tabs: The fewer piezo tabs wired together in a group the better, but anything less than five will be OK in most applications. Depending on your requirements you may be able to work with as many as nine or ten. Use more in a group only if you can accept compromised signal strength and sound quality.
6″ piezo films
With the larger 6″ piezos, the signal strength deteriorated more rapidly as the numbers increased.
1 Excellent
2-3 Very little loss
4-5 Increasingly noticeable loss, but still functional
5-10 Increasingly serious loss
Recommendation for larger piezo films: The fewer piezos wired together the better, but two or three of the large piezos is probably OK, and you may be able to get away with up to five. Use more in a group only if you can accept compromised signal strength and sound quality.
2.5″ piezo films
I didn’t test these in-between-sized films, but if you’re working with them you can assume the results will fall somewhere between the larger and smaller ones described above.
TEST SET-UP
Managing such large numbers of temporary hook-ups (up to 20 for the piezo tabs) was slightly chaotic in a fun sort of way. The test set-up was pretty informal. I did the hook-ups using lengths of hook-up wire with alligator clips at the ends. I’ve got a large supply of these convenient little connectors for just this sort of purpose. I started by hooking up a single piezo film, running its output to an amplifier, and testing it simply by flicking the end, noting the signal strength and tone quality. I then added a second piezo, and a third, and so forth, testing by flicking after each new one was added. After I had hooked up and tested twenty of the small piezo tabs, I then went back and tested a single piezo once again, in order to directly compare the full multiple set-up with the single piezo. I did the same for a total of ten of the 6″ piezos.
Something worth noting about this set-up: the hook-up wire I used isn’t shielded. This means that as I was adding more and more hook-ups, it was to be expected that increasing noise would appear in the system from stray electromagnetic frequencies in the air. This did occur, especially when I switched on certain lights nearby, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared. In a real installation, of course, you’d use shielded wires.
HOW-TO INFORMATION FOR MULTIPLE-PIEZO INSTALLATIONS
You can find full information for hooking up single piezo films here. This is the sheet that comes with the piezo films when you buy them from us. The basic idea is that you run two wires, called the hot wire and the ground wire, from two terminals on the piezo, through a cable and to the preamplifier. (The preamp is often incorporated into a regular amplifier input.) The shorter the length of cable from the piezo to the preamp, the better.
In hooking up multiple piezos, you have a choice of whether to join them in series or in parallel. Because of the electrical nature of piezos, series connection yields poor results; parallel is the way to go. In practice this means: connect the hot lead from each of the piezos in the group to a common wire for the hot side of the output, and connect the ground from each peizo to a common ground wire.
What if the number of piezos you need for an instrument is larger than the number that can work well wired together in a single group? Example: imagine you’re putting pickups on a home-made xylophone with 12 bars, but to prevent signal loss you want to keep the number of piezos grouped together to five or less? The answer is to wire the piezos in two or more smaller groups, and keep the groups electrically “buffered” from one another. In this case, for the twelve piezos needed you might create three groups of four, or perhaps two groups of six. To buffer the groups from one another, they need to go to separate preamps before their signals are mixed. If you’re an electrical whiz, you can build miniature op-amps into each circuit before mixing them. If you’re not an electrical whiz, the easy solution is to send them to separate mixer inputs. This is quite feasible because nowadays there are very compact and affordable mixers on the market with as few as four inputs - you may even be able to affix a mini-mixer to the body of the instrument somehow. This also has the advantage of giving you separate volume and tone controls for each of the groups.
The three-volume encyclopedia known as the New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments appeared in 1985, totaling just over 2,700 pages, weighing 12.8 pounds altogether. That was right around the time I was starting this organization called Experimental Musical Instruments, and I felt it my duty to put up the $350 to purchase it — far and away the most I ever spent on a book, before or since. I’ve never regretted that $350.
The musical instruments dictionary took its place in the tradition of Grove’s music encyclopedias beginning with the Dictionary of Music and Musicians edited by Sir George Grove in 1878. (For the latest incarnations, see Oxford Music Online.) Over the years the Grove’s dictionaries, including many offshoot publications on particular facets of music, have been seen as the foremost and most authoritative scholarly resources in their fields. The 1985 musical instruments dictionary has been no exception in this respect: it’s justly regarded as the final and exhaustive word in musical instrument scholarship. Even after a friend’s dog chewed part of the cover off of Volume I of my copy, it remained for me the first place to look for all things instrument-related. It became less central to my life only more recently with the simplicity and currentness of web searches.
Word has now come that for the first time in 25 years a new edition of New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments is on the way. The editor of the new version is the New York instruments scholar Laurence Libin. “Reflecting advances in scholarship during the past quarter-century,” he recently wrote, “the second edition will encompass a greater range of subjects in more detail, thus serving a larger community of readers worldwide.” In the 1985 edition, most of the articles on conteporary instruments were written by Hugh Davies. And a very large number of articles it was … I often marveled at what a huge amount of work his contribution represented. Sadly, Hugh passed away in 2005.
I’ve seen no date for publication of the new edition … perhaps not surprisingly, since such a work is likely to take a bit of time to prepare. But it’s something to celebrate.
Guess what, I got to see and hear the Intonarumori!
Actually, I saw recreations of sixteen of the Intonarumori as reconstructed, based on the best surviving evidence and descriptions, by the contempory composer Luciano Chessa, in performance in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Some background: The Italian Futurist composer, painter and thinker Luigi Russolo ((1885 – 1947) put forth in 1913 a theory of music based on the idea that it was incumbant upon musicians of the time to leave behind the pastoral past and embrace the clangorous sound world of the machine age. In keeping with this idea, he created and concertized with a series of noise-instruments which he called Intonarumori. The original instruments are no longer extant. The current presentation included performance of a recently uncovered 1916 composition for the instruments, plus compositions by fourteen contemporary composers including the project’s director, Luciano Chessa.
The instruments lined up on stage are a most intriguing sight – sixteen boxes with sound horns protruding in front, cranks and levers from on top and behind. Some of the instruments produce recognizable pitch with a fair degree of pitch control and accuracy; others less so. The sounds do indeed show a close affinity to modern industrial sounds – not so much the loud aggressive sounds Russolo’s writings might seem to suggest, but the quieter, richly textural hummings and scruffings of every day machines and appliances, as brought forward in various moods by the dozen-plus composers.
Under the name Metal + Machine + Manifesto, the show travels to New York for Performa 09 on November 11, and to Milan in December.
Hey, people, I’ve recently joined with Joyce Kouffman (percussionist and everything-elsist) in a video demonstrating how to make a xylophone using pieces of driftwood we found at Drake’s Beach in Northern California. You can view it here or on YouTube. The video was produced by David LaFontaine and Janine Warner of Artesian Media.
I had an inspiring and most enjoyable visit recently with Aurelio, director of the Svaram musical instruments workshop. The workshop is located in the town of Auroville in India’s state of Tamil Nadu. Auroville is an “ideal township devoted to an experiment in human unity,” an international community devoted to lifelong learning and spiritual awareness, founded in 1968 with the blessings of UNESCO and the Indian government. Aurelio, an Austrian by birth, arrived there 1985. Having long experience in creative instrument making, he began some projects which led to the formation of an instrument-making workshop in the community. He trained young workers from the region who in time coalesced into the workshop’s core group of craftspeople. They now make instruments of many sorts both traditional and original, and new designs are always in the making. There’s an emphasis on keeping the instruments approachable and making the music accessible to all.
Through the early years, the workshop survived in part through a series of grants from the community and other sources. Over time, it has become increasingly self-sufficient. While the workshop has always been driven by a spirit of creativity, Aurelio recognizes that it’s time to think increasingly in enterprising terms and project collaborations. To that end, they are developing product lines for both local and international markets, and are happy to enter constructive dialogues and take commissions.
A change of scene: some years ago the German pianist/composer Professor Klaus Fessmann of Mozarteum Salzburg, found himself moving beyond his classical training, seeking more organic musical forms. He was drawn to the idea of sounding stone. By cutting suitable types of stone to a particular comb-like form he found he could draw a clear tone from the stone with the friction of a moistened finger, creating an instrument he called Klangsteine, or Sound Stones. Visiting Auroville, he met Aurelio. Fortuitously, a particular type of granite local to Auroville proved to produce the best tone that Professor Fessmann had yet found for the Singing Stones. With the workshop and skilled workforce in place there, as well as the ideal stone, it was agreed that Auroville was the place for manufacturing the instrument. Hannes Fessmann, son of Klaus, visits regularly there to oversee the process and conduct new experiments. And so it is that if you now go to the Svaram website,you’ll find the singing stones among the instruments under development displayed there. You can also see and hear them at the Klangsteine web site (text in German).
Hey, does anybody know where we can source EMG Select guitar pickups at wholesale prices for sale in the Experimental Musical Instruments catalog? It turns out that this information is strangely elusive (details below). If you have leads on this, please let us know.
In case you’re curious, here is background information on my question.
We sell a couple of different kinds of magnetic pickups, chosen because they’re types you can’t get anywhere else, and likely to be of particular use to people who like to design and build their own instruments. But it has occurred to me it could also be worthwhile to carry a basic, sturdy, affordable guitar pickup – one that could be equally useful for non-guitar applications. That description nicely fits the Select line of pickups sold under the EMG name. These were designed and originally produced in the early days of the EMG company. But when you contact EMG now, they don’t want to talk about those Select pickups. They’ve moved on to producing more elegant (and higher-priced) pickups, and they no longer manufacture the Select line. Yet the Select pickups are still available from various outlets, so it’s clear that someone is still making them. Apparently there is a licensing agreement that allows I-don’t-know-who to manufacture them and imprint them with the EMG name, even as EMG strives to distance itself from its earlier product. In the current packaging for the Select, it’s indicated that they’re made in Korea, but no further contact information is given. So far, various attempts I’ve made to track down a connection have not yielded results.
Meanwhile, I love these totally unfancy Select pickups for what they are. They’re solid as a rock, thoroughly dependable, and remarkably inexpensive. Unlike many guitar pickups, they do not have separate pole pieces, and this means that the pickup functions equally well regardless of the spacing of the strings or other sounding elements above it. The signal strength is respectable and the sound is your basic, unadorned magnetic pickup sound.
So if you have any sourcing suggestions for tracking down a wholesaler, please be in touch.
