I’m moved by the planetarium: I travel to the stars I cannot see, struggle with the scale of what I cannot fathom. Modern planetariums demonstrate the grandeur of God’s creation, but in a secular scientific context. They bring the distant close; make the visible the imperceptible; make manifest the abstract.
Franziska Schroeder and io 0.0.1 beta++ (Ó Riada Hall, Cork, May 25, 2010)
At the io 0.0.1 beta++ ’site, I’m posting short excerpts from the liner notes to ‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531). Written by the California-based interactive media artist Sara Roberts, here’s the second excerpt:
io 0.0.1 beta++ is rather special in being both an instrument and a player. And given the two attributes it has a very particular sound, ‘sound’ here referring to both timbral quality and the broader sense of having an indelible identity, a style, having its own sound. [2]
io has an extravagant range of sounds made with superhuman amounts of air, and superhuman articulations of air resistance: a hummingbird trill that can go on without the limit of breath, bleats, blats, a grainy slur, shifts between piping and sandy sounds, elephant-like trumpeting, a faint spitty-sounding purr, slushy trills, a hoarse blast of full-spectrum noise, scumbling, whispery hisses ramping up to loud razzing. It can make delicate birdlike chirpings then abruptly sound like a power tool under duress, or render sounds reminiscent of emergency vehicles. [Original post at io 0.0.1 beta++…]
[2] George E. Lewis, ‘Interacting with Latter-Day Musical Automata’, Contemporary Music Review, Vol.18, No.3, 99–112 (1999).
