Human Harp
January 31, 2016 10:25 PM   Subscribe

 
This is truly wonderful.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:00 PM on January 31, 2016


Do they add psychedelic 3d visual effects to videos about visual art, such that you can't tell what's part of the art itself, and what is cinematic embellishment?
posted by idiopath at 11:34 PM on January 31, 2016 [3 favorites]


Alien: Let me get this straight, your people built these marvelous gigantic tension musical instruments...
Human: ...we call them bridges...
Alien: ...and you people don't play them.
Human: uh, no.
Alien: What do you use them for, then?
Human: ...
posted by otherchaz at 12:47 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Good. So now when I cross the Mississippi back into my homestate of Iowa it will even sound like I'm going back in time.
posted by hal9k at 4:09 AM on February 1, 2016


The Irish will claim they invented these but they're just little lyres.
posted by hal9k at 4:16 AM on February 1, 2016 [10 favorites]


I was sort of expecting to see the tones of all the struck cables of a given bridge sampled and mapped onto a digital instrument, so it would be "played like a harp" that way.

This is nothing like what I expected, in a very cool way. It's nifty right down to the retro-futurist look of the instrument harness thingy. The repurposed dog leashes are super clever.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 5:16 AM on February 1, 2016


I was thinking this would be a little contact mike / speaker pair that would go on each cable, and then amplify and transpose (into the audible range) the cable's vibrations. So you could play the bridge by hitting each cable. This is much weirder...
posted by gold-in-green at 8:08 AM on February 1, 2016


I hope they know about Galloping Gertie!
posted by mareli at 9:01 AM on February 1, 2016


Less snarkily, I am fascinated by the sounds they are making and capturing here, but frustrated by the sound design that makes it hard for me to tell which reverberations and strange resonances come from the metallic structures of the bridge and which come from VST plugins.
posted by idiopath at 10:02 AM on February 1, 2016


I was thinking this would be a little contact mike / speaker pair that would go on each cable, and then amplify and transpose (into the audible range) the cable's vibrations.

I've had this idea about The Golden Gate bridge for over a decade. The bridge sings and moans in a human-audible way if the wind is right and you can get out there on a low-traffic, quiet day to hear it. It's especially pronounced when the wind is heavy with fog.

My idea was an array of contact and regular contactless mikes and using a really high definition recorder running at 192k/24b and then processing and mixing all the different tracks down into something pretty sounding.

I don't really want to "play" the bridge, though. It plays itself and sounds better than anything I could invent by banging on it with some sticks.
posted by loquacious at 10:47 AM on February 1, 2016


So this is a bit confusing - very cool but confusing. Apparently, there are two things going on - one is devices which attach between the bridge and the "movician", and information about the change of string length, tension, angle etc. are used to control computer synthesis. The other is contact mics attached to the bridge and amplified, pitch-shifted etc. to make the kinds of sounds we were expecting to hear. The sound design on the first video was especially confusing because the synth sounds were heard even when she wasn't "playing" the bridge.

While the bridge project is cool, some of her other projects are even cooler IMO - or at least visually they are well-documented.
posted by ianhattwick at 6:20 PM on February 1, 2016


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