Uni In The Brewery: Session 3

"The Pocket Gamelan: is your mobile out of tune?" by Prof. Greg Schiemer and Janys Hayes

Wednesday 25th July 2007, at 5:30 pm at Five Islands Brewery

Music with which most of us are familiar was created to be sung or played on instruments that use a tuning system known as 12 equal divisions of the octave - that familiar interleaved pattern of five black and seven white notes that we find repeated over the entire range of the standard piano keyboard. However from the time of Ptolemy up until the late Baroque period, most of the world's music was microtonal and is not readily playable on standard instruments today. Yet if we tune familiar 12-equal-division-of-the-octave musical instruments in unfamiliar ways, the general reaction is that the music sounds "out of tune". This would seem to be a problem associated with all microtonal music unless a listener has experienced first hand the special qualities of traditional music played on instruments like the veena, harpsichord, oud, khene, celtic harp, dan bau and many others which are microtonally tuned.

Throughout the last century there have been many attempts to build new micro tonal instruments usually for playing in one specific tuning. But why would a performing musician devote many years of training in order to play a microtonal instrument that played in only one kind of tuning ? This question is even more problematic if such an instrument is electronic because the technology on which it is based will most likely become obsolete even before a performer has had time to master the art of playing it.

Over the past few years I have developed a set of programmable microtonal electronic instruments known as the Pocket Gamelan using mobile phone technology.

More at: http://sonicconnections.uow.edu.au/pocketgamelan.html

These are not specially engineered to be played like existing instruments but generic hardware that I have commandeered in order to develop new performance scenarios made possible by wireless communication. Like its Indonesian namesake, the Pocket Gamelan is designed to be an extensible set of microtonal instruments that is easy to play, quick to learn and able to be used by groups of non-specialist musicians.

RSVP and Information: Vicky Wallace on 4221 4126 or email vwallace@uow.edu.au