Jean-Francois Charles

The Tempomaton Arduino discovery workshop was a fun event. Joël Lorcerie brought a selection of instruments from his great collection. MA Scène nationale just posted a short video about the workshop. See - and listen to - the automatons at 1:40!

Did you guess what was lying in last week's mystery box ? It was a RingWorm guitar pedal , an analog ring modulator made by Way Huge . Ring modulators are fascinating pieces of gear, especially when you know how masterfully Stockhausen used it for Mantra (I already mentioned this composition when I talked about the Electro-chamber music session around Mantra ). Ring modulation turns most harmonic sounds into inharmonic sounds. For instance, the grand pianos in Mantra often sound like different kinds of bells. Other analog ring modulators include Moog's Moogerfooger MF-102 and the device used by Stockhausen in the 70s: Picture by composer Felipe Lara

One of the last assignments of the semester for the students at the Université de Franche-Comté, in the Master's program for multimedia - music & sound option , consisted in the study of a mystery box providing live sound processing. The students were given an audio connection to the input & output to the box, and were to determine its function. The students came up with clever ways of exploring the box, feeding it with sinusoids, musical sounds, or a-periodic signals. They also listened to the output of the box with "no input" (i.e. low level noise). Here is an example of a screen shot included in a student's report. Sonogram of the output of the mystery box, fed with "silence" (left) and a 500 Hz sinusoid (right). The students were free to use the tools of their choice. Mostly, they used Logic or Audacity to feed and record signal, and Sonic Visualiser to analyze the sounds. Looking at the sonogram above, what kind of processing does the my

Thanks & congrats to the Tao Saxophone Quartet for a great concert last Thursday. From left to right: Nicolas Sidoroff, Jean-Philippe Danjou, Étienne Demange, Noël Pelhâte, Gilles Michaud-Bonnet, Jean-François Charles. Photograph by Gabriel Vieille - thanks!