SOUND ON SOUND
Nintendo's ultra-affordable Wii Remote controller can sense movement in every direction, and even knows at what angle you're holding it. Its potential as a music controller is unlimited, and you don't even need a Wii console to use it!
George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique is all but impossible for human musicians to play. So for his latest presentation of it, Paul D. Lehrman built an orchestra of robots...
The New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference has been running for five years, and is a great place to see and discuss new ideas that may provide the musical controllers of the future. SOS was in Vancouver to learn more...
For years bands have needed unwieldy, expensive PA systems to play live, and separate monitoring systems to hear themselves play. Bose's new system aims to do away with much of this complexity and expense. We take a first look...
Not content with reviving and staging a 1920s avant-garde work for the first time, Paul D. Lehrman also worked out a way to reunite the piece with its contemporary film, which was never used due to technical problems. This is how...
Last month, Paul D. Lehrman described how he became involved in a project to create a performable edition of George Antheil's prophetic but never performed, Ballet Mechanique, in its original version with 16 synchronised player pianos and a human ensemble. With the process of sequencing the 1240-measure work complete, he was now faced with the task of preparing the first ever live performance of the piece...
In 1924 George Antheil wrote a piece of music which required 16 synchronised player pianos playing four different parts, along with a bizarre human ensemble. But it took 75 years before Antheil's dream of a gigantic machine-controlled performance was fully realised, using MIDI, by US-based musician and SOS contributor Paul D. Lehrman. In this two-part feature, he explains how this two-year project reached fruition.
Sophisticated effects and audio processing have become pretty standard on professional synths and keyboard workstations. The Kurzweil K2500's capacities in these respects, however, were looking a little dated until now. Paul Lehrman plugs in the new KDFX expansion board.
Prosoniq, the German software company behind many of the DSP processing alogrithms used in MIDI + Audio sequencers, have now made the powerful fruits of their expertise available in stand-alone form. But can the software actually be put to good use? Paul D. Lehrman investigates.
It may say v1.6 on the box, but the latest version of BIAS's Mac-based audio editor is stuffed with enough new features to warrant a version 2.0 tag. Paul D. Lehrman scales new heights.