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At 11:13 PM -0800 2/7/01, Rick Walker (Loop.pooL) wrote:
>I have been going to Radio Shack, lately, and building little
>contact mics out of piezo buzzers.
>Are these the kinds of contact mics you are talking about? Do you buy
>them
>or make them.
I'm familiar with the piezo buzzers, and in fact I have a few.
The contact mics I was using were not of that variety. They were a
bit more massive, about the size of the Enter key on a computer
keyboard, and they had a plastic casing. I have no idea of the source
and it's likely these particular items are no longer manufactured (I
did this piece in 1979). The pickups didn't have much high end, which
is why I supplemented them with air mics, but they did produce a lot
of bass. You might find the reverse to be true with piezos, and it
may be necessary to use combinations of transducers to get the sound
you want.
Something to be aware of is that signal breakup from overload can be
reduced by adding layers of double-sided foam tape between the drum
head and the transducer. There's some tradeoff of signal quality, but
that's part of the art of percussion tranduction.
The music department at UCSD was a real hotbed of electroacoustic
transducer research, mostly in the context of instrument building.
Prent Rogers, Tom Nunn, and David Poyourow had a very interesting
ensemble using large sheet metal sculptures with rods braised on to
them. The sound was picked up with a variety of transducers and the
instruments were mounted on balloons as a way to reduce damping.
Another technique used was mounting of speaker drivers to various
objects (as in David Tudor's "Rainforest") and then to "extract" the
resulting transformed vibrations with pickups. David Poyourow's
"Whale Ghosts Over Coastal Arizona" used piano wire strung hundreds
of feet between highrise dorm buildings. Vibration was induced with
Radio Shack "wall speaker" drivers (since discontinued, I think) and
picked up again with magnetic pickups. Sort of a giant guitar Ebow
system.
>Alas, I don't have access to the mega-expensive instruments, the
>timpani
>and the grand piano (that people don't object to rolling a bowling ball
>down
>;-) There are some distinct advantages to being in the avante garde
>classical musical world, associated with institutions of higher learning.
>Access to equipment is definitely one of them.
Quite true. My percussion piece, for instance, was done while I was a
graduate student at UCSD. However, as my Republican stepfather used
to say, "Where there's a will there's a way." I've manage to scam up
a bit of support from time to time by cultivating relationships with
institutions and manufacturers. I'm also notorious for milking
academic institutions for resources (as Cabrillo College Performing
Arts Chair Lile O. Cruse said, "Never again!").
--
______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD zvonar@zvonar.com
(818) 788-2202 voice zvonar@LCSaudio.com
(818) 788-2203 fax zvonar@well.com
http://www.zvonar.com