source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 15 Jun 1996 10:37:03 -0700 Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: Jacques Dudon's new JI CD -- Jacques Dudon is a French composer who uses patterned glass disks to generate music. By spinning the disk and shining a light through it onto a photoreceptor, Dudon is able to produce periodic waveforms which become audible (when amplified through a loudspeaker) as timbres. Dudon's instrument has been featured in the journal "Experimental Musical Instruments" on many occasions. By moving a slotted scrim between the light source and disk, any by moving from the inner to the outer section of the disk & vice versa, he is able to produce series of pitches. Now Jacques Dudon has come out with a CD of his music. The CD is called "Lumieres Audibles" (Audible Light) and it consists entirely of just intonation music. You might think that music created in this way would be synthetic-sounding and fairly dull. Just the opposite. For many years, Dudon has been working with a computer to generate exotic patterns for his spinning photo-acoustic disks, and he now has a collection of some 500 of 'em. Morevoer, he uses fractal patterns to generate fractal waveforms along with irregular Walsh-series slotted disks which produce extremely evanescent and organic- sounding timbres. "Lumieres Audibles" is remarkable, both for the quality of the timbres and the artistry of the compositions. The sounds on this CD are hard to describe. They sound akin to some of the more sophisticated timbres that can be produced with an anlog synthesizer, but more ethereal and in some cases more "digital-sounding" than standard analog timbres. In other cases, particularly the fractal waveforms, Dudon conjures up timbres whose only close relatives are timbres generated by elaborate computer algorithms. Jacques favors a tuning system which makes his pieces sound middle eastern; he also uses drones, drum-like timbres, and repeated tabla-type patterns generated from interfering and cross-rhythmed slowly rotating glass disks. (Dudon apparently uses some disks as "sequencer disks" at a slow rate of rotation, and other disks as "timbral" disks rotating much faster. By using 6 or 7 different photodiodes and rotating disks, along with volume pedals to switch between the different timbres/sequences, Dudon can produce sonic tapestries of remarkable subtlety and sophistication.) For more about Dudon's just intonation tunings, see the 1/1 article "7 Limit Slendro Mutations," Vol. 8, No. 2, 1994. This CD is *highly* recommended. You can order one of these CDs from Jacques Dudon at Atelier d'Exploration Harmonique - les Camails, 83.340 LE THORONET - phone number 94.73.87.78 --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sat, 15 Jun 1996 19:48 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id KAA00816; Sat, 15 Jun 1996 10:48:02 -0700 Date: Sat, 15 Jun 1996 10:48:02 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu