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The Prepaid Piano & Replayed (E177)

by ANDREW PEKLER

/
1.
2.
Replayed 16:05

about

A—The Prepaid Piano

Selections from the installation The Prepaid
Piano, recorded 21–24 February 2013 during
the Unmenschliche Musik/Inhuman Music
exhibition at Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt,
Berlin.

Inside a grand piano, five mobile tele­phones
rest directly on the strings in five different
areas of the piano soundboard. Calling any
one of the telephones activates its vibration
alarm, thereby directly ‘play­ing’ the strings
on which the phone happens to be lying.

Audience members choose which parts of
the piano are ‘played’ by calling any of the
five telephones’ numbers — either from their
own mobile phones or from the provided
stationary telephones.

Contact microphones attached to the
piano’s soundboard pick up the sounds
of the mobile phones vibrating the piano
strings and pass them on to a voltage-
controlled modular synthesizer.

Incoming signals above a pre-determined
amplitude threshold at the synthesizer’s
input trigger its recording and modulation
functions. The incoming audio is looped
and modulated by the synthesizer and
played back through stereo loudspeakers.

Subsequent calls to the phones produce
new incoming signals that gradually displace
the previously recorded audio. Additional
layers of sounds are added by intermittently
tapping and knocking on the piano,
manipulating its strings directly, repositioning
the mobile phones, etc.

B—Replayed

Using the audio-to-MIDI function in Ableton
Live software, the Prepaid Piano recordings
from side A are algorithmically analysed and
converted into MIDI notation. When applied
to the harmonically and rhythmically ambiguous
Prepaid Piano recordings, the audio-to-MIDI
device’s inherent limitations are magnified.
The MIDI notation it generates under these
circumstances is effectively an original
composition which (although distantly related
to the source material) is the result of the audio-
to-MIDI algorithm’s inability to correctly ‘read’
the information it is presented with. The newly
generated MIDI notation is then used to control
and play a synthesizer consisting of an oscil­lator,
sampler, filter, and effects modules.

Co-published with Senufo Editions

credits

released August 26, 2020

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