Ambient Drones

 

 

I was just reading an article on Roland’s 50th Anniversary piano that they created and its 4 speakers are mounted on drones. I’m really interested in that as I’ve always been interested in immersive sound. You could take that back to Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia, a chromatograph that was just a light bulb that shined through a rotating disc that had paintings on it. He custom-made them for people. Music also always wants to extend itself through the instruments in similarly eccentric ways. It’s important that we do that, but it’s never going to catch on, as quad sound never did. There’s too much hardware involved, and it’s just a novelty. People play with it a couple of times and then it just becomes a toy. What we want to do is just keep music where it is and use sound as the main material. But I do like the idea of putting speakers on drones, and it would be interesting to place them in very large spaces that have very high ceilings, where the sounds are more in the distance and are more of an ambient element in a sound installation. But in my experience, people don’t pay attention to these kinds of things and they become like paintings on the wall.

1/5/2023