Thank you for coming to the guest lecture of Christoph. We had a great time at the workshop. I didn't participate, but what I've seen so far was really amazing. Thank you Christoph for sharing your work and your experience with us and with our students. Today you're going to explain a bit about your work as an artist, as a luthier, instrument maker. And we're looking forward to your insights. Okay, thank you very much, Martin. Thanks. So once again, thank you for having me, Martin, Enrique, and everyone who made it possible. So it's great to be here at the TAM Lab. I really have heard a lot about this lab you're doing. And it's good to be here in person and to witness the wonderful facilities and all of you guys being so involved with the work. i dobrze, że jesteśmy tu osobiście, aby widzieć wspaniałe obszary i wszystkich z Was, którzy są bardzo zaangażowani w pracę. Więc naprawdę jest miło pracować z Wami. Spędziliśmy więc zdrową porcję ostatnich trzech dni rozmawiając, robiąc, budowlanym i kodowalnym. Zastanawiałem się, jak mogę także opowiedzieć o pracy, która nie będzie się od razu powtarzała, jak już mówiłem wcześniej. Myślałem, że może opowiem o kilku innych projektach, które nie pokazałem wam do tej pory. Jak już opowiedziałem, wczoraj wczoraj, trudno mi było powiedzieć, dlaczego buduję instrumenty. To coś, co zawsze było tam. It's hard for me to really tell why I'm building instruments. It's something that's always been there. As far as I can remember, as a child, I wanted to play instruments. I always wanted to be an inventor, doing all sorts of DIY projects for as long as I can remember. So it just seems like a natural conclusion to all of my interests to build my own musical instruments. And over the last 15 years probably or maybe 20 years I've built a number of different types of instruments which can be roughly divided into two categories. The one of the categories is like digitally controlled acoustic sound sources in various ways. And the other category is the performative tools, the instruments that I would like to play myself and use them for live performance and for improvised music. And there is a slight overlap between these two categories. There are some instruments that fulfill the criteria for both, but somehow I tend to think in these two areas, like these two kinds of ways, like finding interesting acoustic sound sources that can be enhanced by using the digital technology to control the acoustic phenomena. On the other hand, I also like thinking about the interface interfaces of musical instruments how they can influence the process of creating music life how they can be helpful or facilitates the communication with the audience for them to understand what's happening to understand the process of the music creation so these are the two categories of sorts I also have a nice graphic which is in Polish so it's probably hard to get but this is roughly some of my projects that are divided into four categories actually but it's pretty much it. This is something I had to do for my PhD thesis, I mean I thought I had to do and it also helped me to really realize that these are these kind of two tendencies that are visible in my previous work. But maybe I can tell you a little bit about why I even became interested in controlling the acoustic sound with digital tools. I think one of the very first projects of this kind that I've made a dozen years ago already in 2013 was something I've called Spectral Score. This is a project that stems from my fascination with the spectral music, the spectralism. That was very heavy, like a very intense thing for me at the time. I've kind of discovered it around 12, 13 years ago. And for me, the spectralism is like a perfect combination of art and technology and it's also I think it's very important as a sort of reinvention of tonal music so to say so the second half of the 20th century were you know after many decades of the domination of atonal music, some composers started to think of how we can get back to the tonality, but maybe from a different perspective. And spectral music, I think, is just that. It stems from understanding of acoustic phenomena and how the sounds, how the timbre is created actually by combining many different vibrations, many different sinusoidal simple vibrations that are combined in the complex waveforms that we perceive as specific timbres, specific kinds of sound. So probably some of you are familiar with spectral music, but I think I just played a little, very short portion of one of the most well-known pieces by Gérald Griset, and this is Partier, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it properly, but the idea with this composition is that as a starting point, Riese took a recording of one note played on trombone in the forte dynamics, and then they've analyzed how the overtones, how the harmonics in the sample of the trombone are developing, how some are louder than the others, how it slowly dies or changes. some are louder than the others, how it slowly dies or changes. And the score of the composition is actually based on the analysis of that single trombone note. And the orchestra, while playing the score, is effectively resynthesizing the original trombone sound, which is the basis of all the spectral music. It's that so-called acoustic resynthesis of sound. So this is what it sounds like more or less. So you can hear all those harmonics coming into life in kind of slow motion, which is also typical of Grise. He also works a lot, worked a lot with stretching the time. And my realization when I found out about this piece and spectral music in general was that obviously in the late 70s or mid 70s when I started to write this kind of spectrometry pieces, the process was quite tedious. They needed to use like an analog spectrum analyzers which were comprised of filter, narrow bandpass filter banks, etc. They would print out the results of the analysis and then would you know manually rewrite it into the score which was then given to musicians to play of course with individual voices but my realization was that you know 40 years later we actually have technology to make this happen in real time. I mean, you can analyze the sound from the microphone and display it as a score immediately on a large screen and have musicians sight-read it and play it live, let's say with just a slight delay to the analyzed sound. And I turned it into an actual musical project, which I called Spectral Score. And the thing here is that the major rule is that each of the musicians involved has their own five or ten minutes to improvise a piece of music. The microphone analyzes the sound of their instrument and it's turned into this quasi score that you will be seeing in the video in a second and The rest of the musicians are kind of following them that the solo is like a two second delay providing that spectral Accompaniment for Yeah I'm not sure if it's Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not sure if it's. The mixer. Let's watch it out. It's a new. Let's. It's a new. Just give me a second. maybe I should just switch here. On the video it's mute. Yeah, you're right. Thank you for this valuable insight. Okay, so this is how it goes. ¶¶ So this is more or less what the project sounded like, always with that slight delay between the soloist and i przywódcą. Nie było to naprawdę spektralna muzyka. Nie używaliśmy żadnych mikrotonalnych pieczek. Wystarczyły tylko 12-stokowe temperamenty, które są oczywiście dużo bardziej praktyczne, jeśli chodzi o granie w zwykłych instrumentach. Aby osiągnąć prawdziwy akustyczny resyntezis, when it comes to playing regular musical instruments. Whereas to achieve the true acoustic resynthesis, you need smaller steps, like 1 fourth of a whole tone, 1 sixth, et cetera, et cetera. But roughly, it's resembled spectral music, sort of. And it was a nice vehicle for playing improvised music, but which sounds completely different To było dobre miejsce dla grania improwizacji, ale to brzmi zupełnie inaczej niż to, co powinniśmy normalnie rozumieć jako improwizację. Współpraca jest zupełnie inna niż grupowa improwizacja. was like a starting point for me to search for other ways to resynthesize the sound from a microphone in many different ways and I've already showed you the one that came after it which was the acoustic additive synthesizer and we also kind of built a similar thing during the workshop. I'll maybe only play a snippet for those who were not present at the workshop. So this is pretty much the same technique as with the spectral score but the musicians are replaced by robotic organ pipes so you can kind of sing or speak to the microphone and the pipes would respond response trying to resynthesize the input so this is like the one leg of the work I'm doing with the acoustically digitally controlled acoustic sound sources and And my goal with this is that sometimes you get some interesting acoustic phenomena, like sound generating devices that really sound intriguing and interesting, but they are difficult to control in terms of controlling the pitch or the volume or something, or the parameters. And with digital technology and digitally controlled actuators like servos, stepper motors, and all other types of actuators, you can actually achieve very precise control over those minute details that determine the pitch or other parameters of some acoustic sound sources. So that's why I like to combine these two elements in a single project because they are complementary sort of. You couldn't really control some acoustic phenomena without the precise mechanical actuators, but on the other hand, the acoustic sound has something to offer that's difficult to mimic or simulate with digitally generated sound and speakers. So that's why I like to combine these two parts. And this also has a lot to do with the concept of post-digitality or post-digital art or post-digital approach to instrument making which is also something I, how I describe my work quite often. w stosunku do robienia instrumentów, co też jest czymś, w którym często wyjaśniając swoje prace. Oczywiście można zrozumieć post-digitalizację w wielu różnych sposóbach, i prawdopodobnie wielu artystów stwierdzi, że używają post-digitalizacji, ale każda z nich prawdopodobnie oznacza coś trochę innego. Myślę, że moja postawka jest bardzo podobna do tego, co proponowano komposiorem Aleksandrem Schubertem, który może być And I think my approach is very similar to something that was proposed by the German composer who is called Alexander Schubert. You might be familiar with his work. So he's a part, or at least was a part of that movement that was later described as post-internet music. So this is the kind of thing that I think the hype about it was like five five years ago maybe like Jennifer Walsh there was that composer who's also like a part of this general tendency but he said generally speaking he's using like this internet era artifacts like vaporwave stuff and you know the junk you can find waprowełów i innych platform, które można znaleźć na YouTube, i włączyć je w jego muzyczne rysunki. Ale powiedział, że to nie jest tak bardzo post-internetowa sztuka, ponieważ internet jest tam i nie będzie się od razu wyrwany. Ale raczej nazywa się to sztuką zauważonego internetu. Wiemy, że internet jest tam, jesteśmy świadomi, jaka jest jego rol the role of it in society, in the world, but we can still, you know, choose other forms of expression and activities. So I would say what I'm doing with my instruments is not so much post-digital approach but it's digital aware or digitality aware approach, which is I'm using the digital technology as one of the possible technologies or techniques that are over there but I always mix it with different techniques or approaches finding the right proportion for a given project so sometimes I don't use digital technology at all sometimes I use a lot of it but it's always kind of a mixture that gives Czasami nie używam technologii digitalnej, czasami używam, ale to zawsze jest miks, który daje najlepsze rezultaty dla pewnego projektu. To jest moje zrozumienie post-digitalnego rozwiązania. another concept that I would like to talk to you about and it has more to do with the other part of my artistic work and the subject is something that was I think we should attribute this concept to Don Norman the designer although I'm not sure if he was the first one to talk about it but the term chociaż nie wiem, czy byłbym pierwszym, który o tym rozmawiał, ale ten temat jest modelem mentalnym, jak coś działa, jak jakiś proces działa. Myślę, że to bardzo ważne na dwóch poziomach, kiedy pracujecie z instrumentami albo kiedy wybudowujecie swoje własne muzyczne instrumenty. Na pierwszym poziomie, który jest najobieżniejszy, or when designing your own musical instruments. At first level, which is most obvious, is when designing the user interface for instruments, especially when you make an electronic instrument, usually you have more freedom to design the user-operated elements in a certain way that you do not have as many constraints as with acoustic or mechanical instruments. So, you know, organizing the interface in a certain way nie ma jakichś ograniczeń akustycznych czy mechanicznych. Organizowanie interfejsu w pewien sposób pomoże utworzowi budować model mentalny, jak działa instrument. Nie musi to refleksować, jak naprawdę działa instrument na zewnątrz, ale trzeba to wierzyć, jak to gramy, i trzeba to być koherentne, żeby móc grać na tym instrumentie. has to be something you are able to believe while playing it and it has to be coherent in order for you to be able to play the instrument. And it's not always, it has been, the concept is valid also for much older instruments, like for example, even the pipe organ, the traditional ones, usually the instrument itself spans many square meters and you know the pipes are all over the place not necessarily there are in the pitch order by pitch they can be in different spots but you have that single interface which is a keyboard which is familiar to all of us right now and it's this kind of creates the metaphor of the sounds put in certain order that this To tworzy metaforę słów w pewien sposób, która pomoże wytrzymać wszystkie instrumenty i ich kontrolować. Nie ma to żadnego sensu, że to nie jest konstrukcja instrumentu. To samo jest z interfejsem instrumentów muzycznych. To prawda, że to jest coś, rzeczy, które ja budowałem. Ale śmieszne jest to, że czasami mogę nawet wstydzić się wierzyć, że instrument działa w pewien sposób, a zresztą jestem w pełni świadomy jak on naprawdę się konstruuje na środku. Jednym z przypadków byłby instrument, który użyłem wczoraj na preformację, granulowy spinpler, który ma spinią część, a więc i nazwę. Może zacznę grając tylko krótki fragment, dla tych, którzy nie słyszeli tego jeszcze. Zn the mute. So we record some sample on it. Like this beautiful singing voice of mine. And then it kind of metaphorically is wrapped around that revolving disc. You can speed it up, slow it down, you can bring up different faders which are controlling like a virtual playback head. So the idea is that it kind of resembles the tape Echo and you would have a number of playback hits around the disc, and you could bring up the volume for each of them separately, you can kind of hear the different portions of the loop. So that was the idea for the interface. So you can also freeze the disc, and then just play individual snippets of the sound. So that's the main, yeah. i wtedy grają indywidualne ślady dźwięku. To jest główny... główny pomysł dla instrumentu, dla interfejsu i dla tego mentalnego modelu, czy interfejsu, interakcji, metaforyki dla tego instrumentu. Jak spinający dysk, to jest reprezentacja ruchu, który jest wewnątrz, a te wadki kontrolują wyobraźne kształty, które są wokół dysku. Ale w rzeczywistości nie ma żadnego prawdziwego ruchu, czegoś, co jest czerwieniem, czy coś w software. Jest jedna tabla, która stawia samplowanie. Sample może być dłuższe czy krótsze single table which stores the sample. And the sample can be shorter or longer and the patch makes up for the actual length of the sample. So when you just want to record something like, pop, pop, pop, it will be stretched all over the, you know, the revolving disk, even though it will only take up very little space here in the table, but you can still also record something that is 10 seconds long. And again, the software itself, it will consume a much larger portion of the actual table, but the metaphor for the performer is still the same. Sometimes wrapped around the disc, and you forget about if it was long or short because it gets stretched. ale sam samtł jest jeszcze łączony z dyskiem i zapomniesz, czy był długi czy krótki, bo się rozpręża. To fajne, bo wiem jak to działa, bo programowałem i budowałem to sam, ale kiedy to grałem, zupełnie zapomniałem o wewnętrznej konstrukcji paczki i zostałem wywołany przez to, jak metafora interfejsu mówi mi coś. Więc męczący model jest taki, że zmieniam te dwie męczące modeli. Jedną z nich jest osoba, która w zasadzie wie, jak to działa wewnątrz, a druga osoba, która gra i tylko skupia się na fizycznej części instrumentu. Więc to jest bardzo interesująca dla mnie doświadczenie. Może też nie jest to dokładnie połączenie, ale może podzielę się z Wami jednym kawałkiem triwium dotyczącym designu interfejsu instrumentu muzycznego. musical instrument interface design. There is an instrument I built a couple of years ago, it's called AutoViola. It doesn't really matter how it works, but the thing is that it's sort of like a digitally controlled Lira da Gamba slash Nickel Herpa slash Viola da Gamba type of thing, but you can control it with this little keyboard which resembles the Hardy-Gardy or Nickel Herpa interface when you have these little keys that help you change the pitch of the strings. And as you can probably see, as you might notice, the keyboard is somewhat inverted. I mean it's like a mirror reflection of an actual keyboard. I mean of course you can imagine it starts from F so you would go F, F sharp, G and etc but it's actually tuned like a regular piano keyboard only in reverse and this is because yeah I will have to go and bring the small keyboard bear with me I think this is really interesting that's why I need to bring it. When you play a keyboard like this, obviously your perception is that on the left hand side are the lower notes and on the right hand side are the higher. But when you play like this, something snaps in your mind and all of a sudden you want the low nose to be over here and the high to be over here. So that's why the keyboard needed to be kind of reflected, reversed so to say. And it came as a surprise for myself as well because when I did the arrangement of keys, something was wrong, I couldn't really get a grasp of it and then when I reversed it, coś się nie udało, nie mogłem się z tym zrozumieć, a kiedy powróciłem, to było takie, że to się czuje naturalnie. To jest również inna zaskoczenie, że w celu zrobienia mentalnego modelu albo metaforycznego interfejsu, który czuje się naturalnie, czasem musisz zrobić coś, co nie wygląda intuicyjnie na pierwszych stronach. To jedna z rzeczy, o których chciałem powiedzieć. Ale także, gdy rozmawiamy o tym konceptie modelu mentalnym, to jest coś, co używamy jako człowieka cały czas, aby mieć zrozumienie rzeczywistości, ponieważ nie jesteśmy w stanie zrozumieć całkowicie, co się dzieje, i wszystkie fenomena, które widzimy. Więc cały czas budujemy i aktualizujemy, nie aktualizujemy, ale opowiedziamy nasze mentalne modeli rzeczywistości, różnych rzeczy, które nas obręczają. I także, kiedy budujemy jakieś muzyczne instrumenty, that surround us. And also when you are building some musical instruments and you work with different types of devices and acoustic sound sources and so on and so forth, you also kind of operate in a simplified version of what's really happening. I mean, you kind of understand how a string instrument works because probably most of us at some point in time has constructed a guitar from rubber band stretched over a shoe box or something and it's like a very intuitive thing that bent string when you pluck it it makes sounds and this is like our small mental model of how a string instrument works when you press press it or change the way it stretches, it changes the pitch and this is quite simple to understand. But yet again, there are phenomena that are much more difficult to really get a grasp of. And I think that I've encountered such a phenomenon that I couldn't really I myślę, że spotkałem takie wydarzenie, że musiałem bardzo ciężko oprócz tego, by wytworzyć męczny model, który miałem na pewnym instrumentie. Kilka lat temu pracowałem nad innym akustycznym instrumentem digitalnie kontrolowanym, którym nazwałem aeromembranofonem. I początkowa rzecz dla tego instrumentu była to instrument, który w Polsce często nazywamy tubafonem. To dlatego, że Krzysztof Penderecki użył tego w jednej z jego kompozycji. I wiedział, że to wymyślił, co oczywiście nie jest prawdą. and he claimed he invented it, which is obviously not true, but the main principle is that you have a long tube or a pipe and then you excite the air cone inside it by just bumping it, and of course when you close it, you get a lower sound. And the way Penderecki used it, but it's also been used in the same way before by the Blue Man Group, is to have a number of these pipes of different lengths, and then you smack it with flip-flops or some similar kind of device, and then you get all those notes like on a mallet instrument, a rimbar, or something like that. And my thought was, okay, maybe let's have a single pipe and then put some holes and keys on it, like on a woodwind instrument, so you should be able to change the pitch of the instrument just by opening and closing the keys, as you can see here on the instrument. But then I thought, it's very clumsy and not really inspiring to play with the flip-flops on a narrow pipe like this, so maybe let's make it a bit wider and let's put some kind of like a makeshift membrane on the drum head of it, only to excite the air cone inside of it because the air is something that is going to make the sound, so it could i nie było w stanie wyścigać w nim górę wody, bo wody są coś, co powoduje, że dźwięk będzie się wyścigał. Może to być jakiś rodzaj wody, czy kawałek, czy coś innego. I zrobiłem pierwszy prototyp z podkładą na górę. I niesamowicie, górka nie tylko wyścigała wody w górę, ale kiedy próbowałeś przytunąć górę, oczywiście cały pieprz wychodził na dół, the air inside of the pipe, but when you try to tune the drum head, of course the whole pitch went up or down, which is true for any membrane instrument. But also when I started to open and close the keys, depending on the... Where is it? It's probably here. No? I found it. Depending on the tuning of the drum head, there was a different musical interval between the same keys. So like for a given tuning, you would open one of the keys and you get like a major second, and then you would tune the drum head down and all of a sudden it's only only half step half minor second and I came to a realization that somehow Detuning the membrane affects the air column inside of the drum as well. So it's kind of like you made the pipe longer by detuning the membrane. It was my intuition that this is probably what's happening, but I couldn't really find anything, any explanation of it, and I eventually find a hint about it in one of the Arthur Benet's books, it's called... Akustyczne fundamenty akustycznych muzycznych, i już tu wspominał, że powinniśmy myśleć o membranie i powietrzu jako jednego generatora, a nie dwóch osobistych. Bart Hopkin w książce też wspomina o tym, że rygidność ściany instrumentu woodwindu ma rolę w tym, jak piecz jest zainteresowana. To jest podstawowa rzecz instrumentu, którą robiliśmy podczas wydarzeń. Mamy tak zwany flut balonowy, czyli flut z balonem rozprężonym przez niego, a przez to, że dotykamy membranu, zmieniamy piecz. It's kind of like a flute with a balloon stretched over it and by touching the membrane you are changing the pitch. And eventually I find an explanation in a large, heavy, serious book that was released a couple of years ago by Springer, which is called Musical Instruments Acoustics. And this kind of behavior is categorized as a coupled system. So this is like a generator that is formed of a couple of different elements, but they are coupled in such a way that changing the parameters of one of the elements changes the behavior of the whole system. So that was my answer and the explanation of the phenomena, but the whole thing was like, you know, for many years I thought I understood how the tubapone works, how the drum works, et cetera, et cetera, but all of a sudden I stumbled upon something that kind of forced me to rebuild my mental model of how it works and to update it and then to go on and use the new model in order to be able to work with the instrument in practical ways. So yeah, so this is the story I wanted to share with you about the mental models and how they affect, sometimes affect your work when you're working with the instruments. Of course, the model that I have in my mind right now is always probably oversimplified Oczywiście ten model, który mam w głowie, jest zawsze chyba zbyt zsąplowany. Najprawdopodobniej, w pewnych okolicznościach, będę musiał go jeszcze raz opowiedzieć. Ale to jest życie. To jest bardzo prawda dla pracowników instrumentów w ogóle, że musisz się zaproponować. Ok, więc może porozmawiamy trochę o tych instrumentach, może pokażę Wam trochę projektu. Nie wszyscy to widzieliście, więc może pokażę jak instrumenty pracują razem, pokażę jak instrumenty pracują razem, dron i wiola. Jest też trzeci, nazywany post-digitalnym saksofonem. Może to wykończę. ¶¶ ¶¶ So you can hear that eventually I've managed to make the drum change the pitch in an audible way, although it's quite subtle, but yeah, some of you have already seen it. Okay, that might be enough. Okay but because the post digital is the word that is important in this space of course, so I will maybe once again say a couple of words about the post-digital saxophone, which I've played yesterday at the concert, I've already shown you and some of you already played it. But the funny bit about the instrument for those who haven't seen it, maybe I'll just play a very short snippet. Oh, you've already seen it in that video, yeah, that's the wooden sax thingy over here. You get the general idea. And the idea of this instrument is that the reed of the saxophone is vibrated by an electromagnet, which is controlled with digital digitally generated sound by the computer the Bellamini and Depends on the interpretation whether it's an acoustic or Electronic or digital instruments. It's really I'm still not sure myself I I mean there are no speakers, the sound really is produced by the air from the lungs of the player, we need to blow it in order to make some sound, make the sound audible, but at the same time it's kind of the vibration of the reed is forced by the electromagnet, so it's kind of hard to tell whether it's really an acoustic instrument or not. And I think this is also very true for many of those instruments that kind of defy categorization. There is that instrument called Haldorofon you might be familiar with, that is used heavily at the Intelligent Instruments Lab in Reykjavik. Jest to jeden z wielu instrumentów, które używają elektromagnety, aby wyścigać struny. W podobny sposób jak w e-bowie na elektrycznej gitarze, która jest już 40 lat. Ale hardorofony, czy inne instrumenty, jak Federico Vissi's Softitar, nie tylko ekscytują struny, ale też próbują używać różnych technologii, wśród których jest AI, aby zrobić instrument żywy, żywy na samym, made the instrument sort of alive, sort of have life on its own that you could react to the way it excites the strings at different moments in response to what you're playing and the thing of interest among others is the categorization of this instrument. Yeah so the author itself claims that this is an electrophone, so actually an electronic musical instrument, even though the sound you hear comes from the strings, not from the speaker. So I would argue this is an acoustic instrument, but it's vague, it's kind of hard to tell. So maybe in the end, maybe it's not that important what category does a certain instrument fall to, but it's maybe a very academic discussion after all, but it's kind of interesting for me. I'm claiming that this is an acoustic instrument, but it wouldn't work without electricity, so maybe it's not that true. But I think maybe that's all on my side because you've already heard a lot about our instruments for the last couple of days but if you have any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them. Yeah? I have questions. Yeah. So how many versions did you build for the saxophone for instance? How was the process? I have a question. Yeah. So how many versions did you build for the saxophone, for instance? Like how was the process? Was the first prototype just working with the reed and electrically controlled? And how did you end up having this high polish design? I mean it's not really high polish as it already is so. To jest coś, co próbuję promować. Kiedy idea pojawia się w twoim umysłu, na przykład na urządzenie, na instalację sztuki, to najlepiej próbować ją wymyślić, zbudować prototyp, albo zrobić eksperyment w czasie możliwości, ponieważ czasami nie warto się na to zastanawiać, ponieważ pierwszy prototyp jest samotnym, więc nie działa. Ale czasami budowanie prototypu daje Ci dodatkową motywację do tego, żeby na nim pracować. Dla mnie pierwszą ideą było to first idea could be exemplified by this diagram. So if you would move the reed, it could either let the air through the reed or block it completely, and you should be able to control it with the electromagnet. So the first prototype was just that. It was just a very primitive 3D-pięty kawałek z kawałkiem z kawałkiem z kawałkiem z kawałkiem i jakaś węgla, która gra z TNC-u przez tranzysty. I co zauważyłem, że nie jest bardzo dobrze reprodukować w wyższych frekwencjach, ale na drugą stronę, możesz grać bardzo nisko, możesz grać And what I've realized is that it's not very good at reproducing higher frequencies, but on the other hand you can go really low, you can play like below 20 Hz stuff. You make like a... there is no limit when it comes to the lower end of the instrument. So my initial idea to have like a solo instrument, like a soprano sax kind of thing, was transformed by that first prototype already, that I can make it like a sub bass instrument but still retain a reasonably compact shape for the instrument because you know the pitch is not determined by the actual size of the instrument but only by the forced vibration of the of the reed so the first prototype was like in the fashion of a soprano saxophone, but the construction didn't add much to the sound. I mean this is the second band, let's count it that way. The third one is the one that I have here with me, which is resembling the alto saxophone kind of thing. And this is an actual sound horn, so it really kind of amplifies the sounds, but this size was slightly too small for the lower notes to play in a satisfying way, so to sound in a satisfying way. So I've built yet another one, which is roughly the same design, but it has a slightly wider bore so it goes much wider at the end than it starts and it's also slightly larger than the third one which we can see on the picture here. And the fourth one wouldn't fit in a suitcase, I didn't bring it with me, but the last one is really like you have there is some meaty low end in it so yeah so to cut the long story short you have four prototypes in order to arrive at the desired outcome and thousands of euros spent on materials not really i mean the most expensive part is the bella mini obviously for all of these and other than that this very simple i mean but you were Ne, res. Največji del je Bela Mini, za vse to. In drugače je to zelo prosti. Ali ste vse razpravili elektroniki? Ne, ne. Imate četiri delovne? Imam dva delovne, da. To je tudi nekaj, kar sem razpravil, da ne razpravim elektroniki za dla istniejących prototypów. Chciałbym zostawić je tak jak są, bo nigdy nie wiedziałeś, kiedy będziesz je potrzebował. W przypadku z punktu widzenia, potrzebowałem trzecią prototypę, bo wielka nie wytrzymała się w piłce. Kolejna rzecz to to, że czasami potrzebujesz tylko jednego instrumentu. Kiedy masz ważną performance i nie chcesz, żeby coś się nie stało, to dobrze mieć nawet wcześniejszymersję instrumentów jako backup, jak wersję do opakowania. Więc nauczyłem się nigdy nie rozłączyć prototypów, które pracują i są jednym kawałkiem. Oczywiście, że te prototypy, które robię, są nieprzyjemnymi, ale z tymi zostawiam mam jeszcze soprano ale z tego zbierałem go dla Bella bo nie brzmi tak dobrze ale mam jeszcze ciało gdzieś w tle yeah this one okay some more questions maybe yeah this one yeah you how the mouthpiece works okay Okay. Oh, yeah. So this is like a cross-section of the 3D model and the actual mouthpiece. And this is that little channel that only leads the air to the pressure sensor. So in order for the computer to know if you are playing or not, the mouthpiece has another narrow channel that only affects the breath sensor. That's why it's kind of more complicated than a regular mouthpiece. And you designed the mouthpiece? In ti si predstavljal saksofon? Ja, seveda je modelirano po resničnem saksofonu, ampak mora biti nekaj pomočenega, da bi se lahko uspelo uspelo uspelo uspelo. At first I thought I'd use a metal iron reed in order for it to be able to be excited by the electromagnet, but I just attached a permanent magnet to the wood and reed. Although you played it and you can tell that the impression is quite different than with a regular woodwind. Widać, że impresja jest całkiem inna od normalnej. Czy masz skrzynkę, gdzie mogę zobaczyć, gdzie są skrzynki? Skrzynki, żeby kontrolować... Nie mam skrzynki, mam gdzieś 3D model, ale jest to proste kontraptyzowanie. Mam tu ruch, który trzyma śrubę, ale też mogę zmienić, jak ciężko jest strzec. So it's like a very primitive solution, but it works. You can regulate how hard the reed is pressed by the rubber band. But also, originally I thought I will need another piece of rubber underneath over here, because I thought it has to be like held this way but eventually I got rid of it in the in the larger prototype and I was not I managed to get much louder sound but somehow for the smaller mouthpiece when I try to remove it it doesn't work that was again I have my mental model of how it works is too simplified to really understand everything that happens. That's the case. But also the book, the big serious book on the acoustics of musical instruments has a very long chapter about the acoustics and physics of the violin and the last paragraph of the chapter is even though we've analyzed the violin for many years now we still fully don't understand how the violin works so yeah that's kind of you know comforting that's i'm not the only one who doesn't fully understand how a given instrument works. And you build it all on your own or you collaborate with someone on those as well? Yeah, I mean, the stuff that I'm showing you today is built by me. I also collaborate with, we have an art group called Pan Generator, and we do like a general purpose interactive installation, I like to call it that way. So we work as a trio. But yeah, with these I usually work on my own, and some little elements can be outsourced, like, you know, PCBs. Custom PCBs are, of of course made by some company somewhere and also for the organ pipe instrument that I showed you before I just, I happen to know a very good organ maker in Poland and he just built me the wooden parts but then the rest is built by me. But yeah I also, to be honest, I came to the realization that the best part is the actual work on the instrument. The time that I am in my workshop and I'm working with the materials and all that stuff, so I'm not trying to outsource it because this is the biggest source of satisfaction for me. And maybe also new ideas are coming from there, right? Yeah, yeah. From the mistakes and things. from me so yeah and maybe also new ideas are coming from there right yeah yeah i mean from the mistakes and things yeah yeah sometimes you just you can get surprised by just working on the physical stuff so i don't do not really believe in that you know some some artists try to promote the notion that the idea and the concept comes first and only then you find means to make it alive, to realize it. And I think it's a constant dialogue between the matter and the concept. And sometimes, you know, some of these instruments wouldn't come into existence if it wasn't for a certain type of component, electronic or mechanical, which was the inspiration for the whole instrument. So I think it's like being in dialogue with the material, matter and the materials and the techniques is really important because it's like a feedback loop between the ideas and the possibilities. That's my approach, I would say. Anything else, maybe? Yeah? Maybe from the instruments that you've already created, looking into the future, do you have any ideas where you would like to focus on in terms of whether maybe digitalizing already existing instruments or creating something completely different inspired by existing instruments or any tools that you think would be cool and new? Do you have any ideas on future projects? I mean I always have a number of ideas that I would like to try. So I have a special document somewhere in the cloud that I have like 30 concepts that need to be tested and prototyped. But I'm not really sure, because last December, I've defended my PhD degree. Nie jestem pewien, bo w zeszłym styczniu podzieliłem się mojego studia PhD, a to był projekt z trzema akustycznymi instrumentami, i to zajęło mi około 4 lata. I po takim wielkim projekcie, to jest jakby... To jest jakby grzebienie. Więc nie mam w głowie bardzo oczywistego następnego wielkiego rzeczy. kind of grieving, you know, sort of. So I don't have like a very clear next big thing on my mind, but I focus on the little projects that just make, are just fun to make. I can maybe show you one more funny thing, which I have done recently. Yeah, this one. So this is there is no acoustic part in it, maybe apart from from a very short fragment. But this is also like a direction that is more and more interesting for me. So this is a project that combines video feedback with audio feedback. Audio feedback is obviously something we know when you put a microphone to the speaker and you go, woo, and the video feedback is similar when they take a camera and point it at the monitor that's showing the image from the camera. But at first you get that TV inside of TV, TV, TV, recurrence kind of thing. But when you get the parameters right, the zoom, the lighting, the contrast, you get all sorts of abstract images appearing magically on the screen. It's due to the imperfections of the technology. And I came up with a way of combining these two phenomena. And in this video it's kind And in this video it's kind of explained how it works, sort of. So first part is the camera that only has one pixel. It changes the brightness into voltage that is sent to a speaker. sent to a speaker. So when the brightness changes frequently enough you start to hear it. So when you have a flickering light source like any LED screen you can actually hear a clear pitch. So that's one part. I'm creating sound from the picture so we have that covered. And this is the second part To jest jedna część, ja stworzę dźwięk z zdjęcia, więc mamy to opiekanie. I to jest druga część, która stworzy zdjęcie z dźwięku. I to jest użycie bardzo prostego wideosyntezatora, który tylko moduluje sygnał w wideo. modulates the video signal like the yet again the voltage is directly the voltage that comes from the microphone is quite a direct kind of directly changing to the brightness of the lights lines on the screen so when you combine these two in a feedback loop you get like a common coupled system in the game. So the visuals become sound and the sound becomes visuals and with the camera you can affect both the sound and the video and the same happens with the microphone as you will see in a second. So this is of course rather limited, it's like a one trick pony sort of thing. But I've also built another camera which has an additional rotating shutter so it introduces amplitude modulation so you can get more interesting sounds from it. And then I have also a switching mixer for it so you can make more rhythmical stuff with it. And also I've used it for a performance at the Audi Art Festival in Krakow last year and here it was displayed on our art screen with a projector and I also used some acoustic tuning forks as a starting point for the performance so they create specific frequencies, create specific patterns, so the tuning forks are just a means of making like preconceived patterns sort of thing. Then we have the fifths here, and the kind of intermodulation appears. And then I will be, as far as I remember, slowly introducing one of the cameras by turning the iris. And you can hear how the sound and picture get transformed slowly. Etc, etc. But this is also fun. Generally speaking, using the feedback for musical instruments is really inspiring from the performer's standpoint because it's kind of unpredictable in a way, but when you find a sweet spot when you are in control of it, it's very satisfying because very minute differences in parameters can change the things dramatically, but sometimes you just find the right amount of change that helps you control it. So the feedback instruments are generally coming back big time recently. There is many projects that use different forms of feedback nowadays. Okay we have 7 p.m. maybe. But if you have some questions, of course, I'm happy to answer all of them. So continue in the bar. Yeah, then I suggest a big applause to Christoph. Thank you. Thank you also, Vanga. Thanks for coming to Lins and yeah, stay in touch. Thanks, Vanga Thanks again for coming. And thank you all for coming.