Finished making the final instrument last night. Had a dig around dad's toolboxes and found suitable bits and pieces to make it, which was quite lucky I think. I didn't know that we had all this stuff so I was quite pleased.
These are the tuning pegs at the back. They're in quite tight, so for tuning you've got to use pliers to turn them and to keep the pegs secure.
Strings pulled taut from the can. E and A string was hard to tune properly, however, when not tuned perfectly it does give quite a lovely metallic sound. Also, when you add pressure on any string with something hard and begin plucking you get a variety of pitches. When the pressure is slid, you get a sliding pitch. The variety of sounds between strings is something that I quite like. I love the bass sound of the rubber band, the quaint twangy quality of the nylon string and the metallic sound of the violin strings.
Unfortunately the D-string broke. So I'll have to find a replacement for that. I don't know if I have any more D-strings though. Will have to have a look around the house.
The violin strings have their own little stopper to prevent the strings from flying out the hole, but the rubber band and nylon strings don't. So I tied beaded balls, which is a leftover from a previous project, on to the end as a topper for those strings. They're quite strong, so they work well as stoppers.
This morning Sam D showed me how using something hard as a pitch changer sliding up and down strings can get you cool sounds and a variety of pitches. I quite liked that. So I'll get something for that to fit on to my fingers. No doubt there will be something lying around the studio at the end of the day and I'm pretty sure I'll find something random at home that would be suitable, that happens quite a lot for some reason.
Today we were talked to about the next project. We can do either a performance or an installation. And we can work solo or in groups. Some examples were shown too, I'll talk about my favourite ones.
For the performance examples my favourites were the Printer Orchestra and Pierre Bastien.
The Printer Orchestra was uniform, beautiful, and powerful. I really love it when you have many of the same thing doing the same thing or working cooperatively. This is especially the case when you apply that to things with free will, like humans. I love it when humans do the exact same thing at the same time like in military parades or the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony in 2008. It's really powerful when you can get humans with free-will to do something together. The synchronicity I'm talking about in my view adds to the performance of the printer. How they start off making the same sound, their screens flashing together and separating into different layers later on.
I've always loved music boxes. At one point I wanted to make one, but never found the means to make one or any of the needed materials. This is why I love Pierre Bastien's work. His water activated music box really caught my attention. It seemed fun and jolly. His works are derived from toy-making and they're machine-like and have many triggers. I love that aspect of his work. Personally I love toys and if I have something to fiddle and play with I'll be happy for the rest of the day. So this is another reason why I like his work. You can touch them and play with them. It's fun.
For installations I had two favourites as well. Both of them are the works of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot.
The first is cute zebra finches playing electrical guitars. They land on the instruments, hop around on them, pluck at the strings and little twigs, which makes a sound on the instruments. They looked rather confused. I thought it was cute and funny.
The second is floating ceramic bowls in water. It was lovely, soft, gentle, peaceful, and tranquil. I thought that was beautiful and it was lovely how the atmosphere is affected by its soft twinkling sounds in addition to the aesthetic qualities of the space it was in.
I like how in Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's work things just happen. Nothing's planned and its simplicity grown into something interesting really catches my attention. I'd love to do an installation like that.
For me, I think I prefer installation as opposed to performance. I'd like to work in a group as well, but I'm not sure about it since classmates have free will and they might not want to work in a group. If I do get to do installation I want it to be simple, but repeated simplicity to create one whole.
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