Film/TV composers have a particular interest here on CDM in that they tend to think creatively about style, instrumentation, and sound in their work and have to meld one technology (music) with another (film). It’s Friday night, so having resisted this long, I can no longer avoid mentioning Galactica. Composer Bear McCreary, who has scored the Battlestar Galactica TV series, has a blog going in which he talks about his music and some of the instruments featured in the show’s eclectic (and often surprisingly ethnic) sound textures:

For tonight’s episode, McCreary blogs his featured violinist, Paul Cartwright, whose electric violin is largely responsible for the signature sound of the show. CDM readers I think will especially like his bag o’ covet-worthy gear, including a tube amp and set of stompboxes any guitarist would love to have, let alone a violinist. The small tube amp is especially interesting to me, because one of the challenges of electric violin is softening out the tone, both to distinguish it from just sounding like a guitar or, at the opposite extreme, being too harsh. I love the analog approach, and there’s still plenty to be learned if you’re a computer-toting violinist (and, of course, I wouldn’t be the person I am if I didn’t point out computers can be great fun with violins, too).

Bear McCreary blog (erm, blog in a sort of mid-90s, stuck in frames sense — no RSS — but well worth reading!)

Bear McCreary is an interesting composer in general, a young, rising star in a hyper-competitive field.

Amplifying violins — and processing them with bizarre Max/MSP patches using mics and pickups and gyroscope bows — is no longer a major challenge. But it wasn’t always so. Early recordings of violins faced the challenge of the fragile sound of the instrument. Builders like John Matthias Augustus Stroh devised a primitive but effective solution: attach a horn to the instrument. The results are nothing if not wacky, and they reveal a lot about how instruments and technology evolve over time. I’d love to see more of this thinking in modern digital instruments, and violin/horn mash-ups seem even more compelling creatively now. They’re begging for a digital rendition.

Benedict Anthony Heaney has written up a short history of these now-unfamiliar instruments:

STROH/HORN-VIOLINS, 1899-1949 [Digital Violin]

For more assorted information on violins, players, and recordings on a site of somewhat archaic and mysterious design, see the rest of Mr. Heaney’s Digital Violin site — start with the data link.

Custom electric violin builder E.F. Keebler goes a little over the top with instruments like his Inferno. Pimp my violin, indeed: this is the first acoustic instrument I’ve ever seen that I can confidently say is NOT street legal. Take a look at these specs:

1. 79 LEDs in the fingerboard in a flame pattern, reponsive to motion and playing
2. 92 LEDs on the side for a flickering-flame effect, also responsive to music
3. 12 additional flame lights
4. Custom flame shell with custom engraving and airbrushing
5. Pewter sculpted devil’s head, designed by the late fantasy artist James Lane Casey
6. Laser-powered eyes and a spark-shooting mouth

E.F. Keebler Violins

You’ll pay a few grand for all the options, but it’s not just for show: Keebler’s designs are customized for playability, too. But, for you DIY types, you just have to appreciate the guts inside:

That’s just the beginning: electric violins are a must-have for music students, rockers, and (for some reason) crossover classical women wearing latex catsuits:

The original design of the violin is a classic, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to improve upon it with modern tech.

While it looks mostly like an ordinary bow, the Hyperbow is designed to electronically measure gestures and calculate force, speed, and bow-bridge distance, thanks to accelerometers, gyroscopes, and force sensors. The bow, designed by MIT Media Lab Ph.D. candidate Diana Young, began as a way to measure different bowing techniques. But combined with MIT’s Hyperviolin, the all-electronic/non-acoustic violin also developed by the MIT Media Lab, the bow can unleash new means of making music with violins. If you’ve seen this before, it’s because Young has been working on it for several years and presenting it as it develops; the Hyperviolin for its part has been played by the likes of Joshua Bell. Here, Diana Young is pictured with Hyperbow and Hyperviolin from earlier this summer. (Photo: Donna Coveney, MIT News.)

Grad student’s Hyperbow makes music to measure [MIT News]
ASA paper abstract [Acoustical Society of America]
Video and audio clips, Toy Symphony (Featuring Hyperviolin)

So, what do you think? Innovation or reinventing the … um …. bow?

We hear lots of discussion of how to make better digital instruments. But to fully understand instrument design, it’s often best to look at instruments from around the world that have evolved over centuries. (Hey, these synthesizers and such, by comparison, are mere infants.)

Here’s a fantastically virtuostic performance from 11 year-old Sirena Huang, via June Cohen on the TEDtalks blog. Following the music, she discusses in frank terms why the instrument is such a timeless design. She’s got a smart audience for such thoughts: the performance comes from the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, a legendary gathering of “thinkers and doers”. And while Sirena feigns surprise that her violin would be included with “real” technology like an iPod, I think she recognizes the violin is the better design by far.

Embedding their videos doesn’t seem to work, so I suggest checking out the story directly:

Sirena Huang on TEDTalks [Video links and comments, TEDblog]

Thanks to our friend Matrix of Matrixsynth fame for this. The TEDblog has plenty of other music coverage, including a similarly virtuostic video of pianist Jennifer Lin, not to mention lots of other general cool tech and non-tech topics.

Notably, on the topic of violins, the blog has a mini review of the book Stradivari’s Genius by Tony Faber, exploring the history of the most famous of violins.

Will digital instruments ever match an instrument like the violin? I tend to look at it the other way: watching a great performance is as much about the player as it is the design of the instrument. Practice your favorite digital instrument for a lifetime, and see what happens. And keep in mind that “easier” isn’t always better. A violin is anything but intuitive, and sounds awful when you first play it.

Talk about digital technology and music, and people are often skeptical: doesn’t technology get in the way of making music? But technology and music have always been interwined, and even for advanced composers, better understanding the technology of how acoustic instruments work is fundamental to realizing musical ideas. Unfortunately, orchestration books, despite their best intentions, can be disastrous for composers trying to understand instruments. Books by definition can’t include musical examples, and the texts themselves are often divorced from real practical information.

Now the good news: the Web could offer an antidote.

“The dream of a violin that can play itself has tantalized inventors for over a century.” Well . . . mad scientist inventors, maybe, along with dreams of self-cleaning carrots and ironing boards that can go into battle.

Nonetheless, here it is: I give you the Gulbransen Virtuoso Violin, a QRS Pianomation Player Violin. Put on a violin piece, and it sounds like the violin is really there — because it is. Ain’t no digital samples here, just a MIDI-controlled bow hacking away at a real violin.

List price, $20,000, but for some reason it’s at a fire sale bargain-basement discount bin price of US$12,500.

I’d love to feed it some unplayable Max/MSP patch, but they’ll have to let me get my hands on it first. And if there are audio samples there, I can’t get at them. Anyone else know about this bizarre invention? You’ll also find other instruments on the site, like the . . . hold on, this calls for another post. Thanks, LeMel!

Pop quiz: what instrument by pioneering “father of digital audio” (or, if you’d rather, “great-grandfather of Techno”) Max Mathews was featured on the cover of Playboy Magazine?

If you guessed the IBM 704 mainframe, the computer on which Mathews generated the first computer music the world ever heard, you’d be — wrong! Would that we were so lucky. I’m sure you hard-core geeks can imagine your favorite woman or man sprawled over those . . . crisp lines . . . cold, slab surfaces . . . humming away . . . see the 704 photos here and here.

The correct answer is, as shown, Mathews’ Electronic Violin, from the April 1998 Playboy. The player is a serious violinist named Linda Brava who, apparently, has an affinity for posing for soft-core violinist porn. Then again, if I were a blonde bombshell Finnish violinist, my publicity shots would probably involve me in lace-up boots, too. Brava has a hard-core violinist resume, but she really does play digital violins — not just for photo shoots.

But, in all seriousness, I don’t enjoy looking at Finnish violinist nearly as much as looking at IBM mainframes, especially as operated by serious-looking businesspeople in suits. So, for posterity, check out the real first digital musical instrument after the break (hit ‘read more’). Oh, sure, it was too slow for real-time digital audio and IBM discontinued it in 1960, but that hardly matters. 704 forever. Rock and roll!