Compound Acoustically-Controlled Music Instrument

If no one has "invented" some form of the Compound acoustically-controlled music instrument, or CAMI, I would like to see it get underway ASAP. It's an idea founded on the principle that sound has a multitude of tunable acoustic properties. One example of an acoustically-tuned device is the "Leslie" speaker system from the 1960s. Here is a Leslie:



Invented by Donald Leslie and associated largely with the Hammond organ, the Leslie utilizes the Doppler effect to tune the physics of sound waves and achieve a vibrato effect. Although such an effect can be approximated digitally, the Leslie is fully acoustic.

Analogous to this is the effect of acoustic volume control. A typical stereo amplifier has a volume knob that allows you to alter the volume of sound output. Here is an acoustic version of the volume knob:



By changing the opening at a doorway, you acoustically change the volume in the room without altering the source. Some interesting artifacts of acoustic volume control include preponderance of penetrative frequencies. In other words, low frequencies tend to penetrate closed surfaces better than higher frequencies.

How can this principle be used to create an acoustically-conditioned instrument? The operative word is condition, as in how can you condition existing sounds peripherally, i.e. without changing the source. This comes down to applying what strategies are available, such as:

Ducts



Dampeners


Baffles



Live acoustics



I would like to see how far this technique could be taken. An acoustic instrument with an interface similar to a chest of drawers or a group of theremins could provide enough variation to engage a composer's creative expression. It could potentially usher in a new musical form.

Banned Hip Hop from Brooklyn

In a spare moment, I recalled a song my brother and I had on cassette tape from around 1988 that was a cut up assemblage of JFK assassination sound bites into a sort of rap song. Ever since we taped that song off of Dallas community radio, we always kept it around for us and our friends to hear. We had heard it was *banned*, which made it exceptionally strong arsenal in our tape collection.

So I was trying to find it again, and as it turns out, the authors of the song were known as Double Dee and Steinski, aka Doug DiFranco and Steve Stein, a couple of media biz 20/30 somethings in NY at the time. There's plenty of info about them, including interviews and a spot in the turntablism movie Scratch.



Given the common broadcast origin of cut-ups and samples in songs, I find it remarkable that a Brooklyn DJ duo could put their ideas into a song that resonated so well for us for completely different reasons. Growing up in Dallas, we found it ominous and on some level subversive to hear a song that flagrantly spun a day of infamy into an arty rap song. Plus you could kind of spaz out to it.



You don't need pirate radio to get Steinski anymore, it's available at Amazon. Following decades of legal obstacles, it has recently been released for the first time.


Or hear it here.