1 post tagged “indeterminacy”

Here's a recording I made last night from an old Edison cylinder. I particularly enjoy the whistle duet, vintage political subtexts, and most of all ... the wonkiness, for lack of a better word. I mean, does LoFi get any better? Before vinyl platters, there were cylinders like this one slightly smaller than a soda-can etched with sound much like how an LP is etched. The cylinder player used for this recording is an acoustic instrument using no electricity. A needle tracks across the cylinder like the needle of a record player and attaches to a small membrane which feeds the sound into a metal cone which amplifies the sound to a good loud volume. The cylinder spins with the energy from a spring that the user must wind tight by hand with a crank on the outside of the box. Classic.

Most fun for me is the indeterminacy implicit to these cylinder players, you just never know what you're going to get. Every performance of a recording is unique because the LoFi physical system imposes mechanical inconsistencies which are impossible to repeat. Toward the end of this recording, my spring started running out of tension. I just let it go and listened.