Erol Sarp and Lukas Vogel, students in the Audio and Video Engineering program,　call themselves grandbrothers, and have made it their objective to use experimental playing techniques to coax new sounds and rhythms out of the grand piano.
Alongside the grand piano and a laptop, amongst other things they are working with twenty electromagnetic hammers they developed themselves. These hammers can be individually controlled using the laptop, and are either mounted in fixed positions, or are suspended on pendulums. They do not only strike piano wires, but also certain resonance areas of the grand piano, producing both notes and percussive sounds.
The project is being supervised by IMM professor Phillip Schulze within the framework of their Audio 2 exam.

 

Thomas Orr and Maurice Braun, students of the Audio and Video Engineering program, have now moved into the IMM with the work on their sound pendulum. This installation will provide the two students with the content for their Audio 2 exam in the major Music Informatics. The prototypes are currently being further developed in the Experimental Lab. With eight pendulums to which loudspeakers are attached, different sounds are to be produced, ranging from generative soundscapes to simple signals and even tangible snatches of conversation. A computer controls a chain of micro-controllers which each drive one pendulum, control its position and can trigger a safety catch. The whole thing can already be seen in the students' blog, which documents the development of the work.

 

The multi-channel sound sculpture with projection mapping Paketzentrum 47 was inspired by investigations into the origin, manufacture and material composition of a laptop. In this process the starting elements of the work were found: packaging material of entertainment electronics, images of the raw materials that are required to manufacture a laptop, and the recordings made by a mini-recorder that was forwarded in continuous operation.

The work was conceived, designed, composed and programmed by Lukas Truniger, student of the Music and Media bachelor progam. The sculptures were developed together with Katharine Hauke, student of the Communication design diploma program at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. For the technical implementation of the projection mapping and the multi-channel sound, a specialist system in the programming environments SuperCollider and Max/MSP was developed. The documentary clip of the installation was realised by IMM students Julian Martinz and Björn Mauder.

The work was produced as part of the majors Visual Music under Prof. Dr. Heike Sperling and Andreas Kolinski and Music Informatics under Prof. Julian Rohrhuber and Hannes Hölzl.

 

The IMM Rundfunkorchester (IMM Radio Orchestra) is an ensemble for manipulated radios that are played via a network. The merging of analogue and digital sound levels creates an unusual sound performance that reflects on the development of our media culture: the broadcast itself becomes the instrument.

The performance on 28 May 2010 was interpreted by Julius Hochstrate, Jonas Hummel, Maurice Braun and Lukas Truniger, with the support of IMM assistant professor Hannes Hoelzl.