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Minimoog voyager and Mother 32 prepared thanks to dowser pendulum

Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2021 4:13 pm
by JimPetit
Dear Moog aficionados,

I'm Jim Petit, a french professional composer and musician. Thought my main instrument is lap steel guitar (weissenborn, hindustani's 22 strings Chaturangui, 14 strings electric lap steel I've designed), I've turned into that Moog synths' thing for something like a decade. My first use was to overdubbed my slide guitars' composition in a Pink Floyd - Ravi Shankar's kind of music, then for a progressive album made with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra. Since 2017, I've dedicaded myself in augmented field recordings based on seasonal superimposed field recordings from the place I'm living. I've called it a 5th season and it is presented as a soundwalk for the people who come here in the outer edges of a Vosges moutains'valley.

After that project I needed to go one step further in that augmented soundscape's thing... Here came the idea : analysing the waters of 3 lakes with a dowser pendulum to prepare the Minimoog Voyager and Mother 32 ! This could be (and it is) a way to transpose the inner waters musicality into substractive synthesis.

You can stream (or buy) this music here : Au son des lacs

This album is the result of pendulum analysis of the waters of the lakes Altenweiher, Fischboedle and Schiessrotried. Only Minimoog Voyagers (and Mother 32 on the Altenweiher's track) are used.

Thanks to this approach, I was able to define for each lake the musical notes to use, the tempi, time signatures and set several MinMoog Voyager and Mother 32's' oscillators, frequency filters and other envelope generators. To these electronic compositions, I've added the seasonal soundscapes to produce three original and ambient musical pieces.

My next project will be live performances with a wind orchestra (plus alphorns) based on solstices and equinoxes soundscapes recordings and pendulum analyses of 4 peaks surrounding my place :-)

Stay well in those complicated days.

Jim

Re: Minimoog voyager and Mother 32 prepared thanks to dowser pendulum

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2021 2:28 pm
by ummagumma
Salut!

wow, that is very interesting. How does the pendulum system work?

I did a quick search and found this doc:

http://trin-hosts.trin.cam.ac.uk/clock/ ... ndulum.pdf

but curious how you applied it to water depths & currents, to get CV ( assuming ? )

ps listening now, sounds good

Re: Minimoog voyager and Mother 32 prepared thanks to dowser pendulum

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2021 6:07 pm
by stiiiiiiive
Salut et bienvenue à toi !

Interesting, I'll listen to that for sure!

Re: Minimoog voyager and Mother 32 prepared thanks to dowser pendulum

Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2021 3:56 am
by JimPetit
Bonjour,

By pendulum, i was meaning dowsing pendulum. I use it to know how to set the voyager parameters from lakes waters "radiations". Here is a short video I've done where I use the pendulum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU1H9WJrZl0

Have a good day

Re: Minimoog voyager and Mother 32 prepared thanks to dowser pendulum

Posted: Tue Feb 02, 2021 7:24 pm
by ummagumma
that's hilarious!

I thought you were using a scientific instrument to log currents, depths, temperatures, and whatever else, to get CV out of different lakes. I guess that is quite possible as well :D

your approach is still very interesting

Re: Minimoog voyager and Mother 32 prepared thanks to dowser pendulum

Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 11:47 am
by ummagumma
Jim, can you explain a little about your process to use the pendulum as a sound source?

I watched the video but didn't see anything about it; je peux parle francais un peux, mais pas tres bien

merci!