OT. Ideas, questions.

[CCartCat at aol.com]

<<At 06:03 PM 24/08/00 +0200, Ingo Debus  wrote:

>But the connection between a tape playback head and a preamplifier is
>very sensitive to hum pickup. Maybe an optical solution is easier?
>

OH NO! the Optagon reinvented!!

paul perry melbourne australia
>>

Yeah, just get a functioning Optigan at a thrift store, figure how to 
disengage the drive wheel (that makes the optigan disk spin) and you can 
maybe scrub/scratch a sound.  

Oh, if you want to scrub a sound other than a loop off the Polynesian Village 
disk (think Martin Denny) or whatever disks you happen to have, well . . . 
er, um,  make a new optical film disk of your own sounds.   <grin>

To answer a previous question, yeah, Laurie Anderson did play tape strung on 
a violin bow against a play head mounted on a violin.  Might be time to 
retread idea as alternative phrase sampler gadget.  Dunno if anyone else ever 
played with this idea . . .

PC/Mac software that allows some kind of back & forth scrubbing would a less 
visceral option.  Sound Sculptor II for the Mac  *sort of* works that 
way--you can shuttle fwd & back from 1x to 2x speed, but not at less than 1x 
speed.  The funky not oft seen tiny Yamaha sampling keyboard, VSS 30, can 
loop and has a reverse button that you can toggle real time ("emit laereal 
time reallaer emittime" etc).  

'Course nothing beats the look and feel of tape . . . or is that cotton?

And in the vein of avant garde tape use, the Steve Reich piece "Come out" 
uses  copies of same tape loop (of someone saying "come out to show them") on 
multiple decks.  The loops start in sync and begin to drift out of sync and 
play against one another.  As I recall (corrections/additions welcome), the 
piece begins with two loops, then four, then eight perhaps (a sea of noise by 
then).

Lurking again,
Kevin Seward