ELECTRIC LADYLAND:
Adventures in Electroacoustic Performance

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“The piece begins with the instrumentalists trying to sync with the drips,” Bobrowski says. “As the piece progresses, the dripping frequency increases, and it gets too difficult for the musicians to keep up. The computer then attempts the same process, which results in a contrast in errors between the human performers and the computer. Both make mistakes but in different ways. For example, the computer often interprets a quick succession of drips as one drop. Also, the sounds are sometimes triggered by the computer so quickly that you end up with a series of drones—especially when the piece is played in a reverberant space.”

Strings and Things
For her String Quartet:Music Box, Bobrowski created a prepared string quartet by playing a cello, viola, violin, and quarter-size violin with flexible materials attached to the shafts of small DC motors. The materials include leaves, grass, rubber bands, flexible plastic strips, and tape (see Fig. 1). Bobrowski connected a Variac variable autotransformer to the system to control the motors’ speeds. “There are several motors per instrument,” Bobrowski says. “By changing the voltage going to the motors with the Variac, participants can change the tempo of the piece.”

In a variation on the instruments-played-with-motors theme, Bobrowski wrote a score in revolutions per minute for her piece 0002>2000 RPMs. In that piece, Bobrowski gives performers handheld motors with wooden dowels attached to the spinning shafts. Little flags of tape attached to the ends of the spinning dowels are used to play the instruments. Although performers control their own motors, the composer controls one section of the piece with a Variac. The instruments—acoustic and electric guitars, cello, and violin—survived the lashings unscathed.

Plumes and Foliage
As part of an installation called Leaf Litter, Bobrowski crafted “leaf speakers” by gluing piezos to a collection of leaves and using them as playback transducers. The sounds of people walking through leaves and children playing in leaves are played through the speakers, creating self-referential filters.

“When you play sounds through normal loudspeakers, you’re usually looking for the purest representation of the original sound,” Bobrowski says. “I wanted to take environmental sounds—in this case, sounds involving leaves—and see what happens if you play them through the material itself. I was interested in hearing the resonances and filtering effects that would result from playing leaf sounds through leaves.”

Liquid Audio
Bobrowski’s most recent work, Oceans in a Box, involves an acoustic instrument she devised called the Gliss Glass (see Fig. 2). Gliss is short for glissando and refers to the instrument’s ability to create six simultaneous glissandi. The instrument uses six custom glass containers connected by plastic tubing and valves to a large water container. Each glass is open at the top, and the valves control water flow to each glass through a hole in the bottom.

Musicians can play the instruments in several ways, including rubbing a wet finger around the glass’s rim, tapping and striking the glass, and splashing the water (see Fig. 3). Each player has an effect on the other glasses, depending on the glass’s height and valve position.

“The Gliss Glass is based on a simple property in physics where a body of water tries to return to equilibrium due to atmospheric pressure,” Bobrowski says. “By raising or lowering the glasses, the performers disrupt the equilibrium in the entire system. As the glasses are played, the audience hears rising and falling glissandi as water enters or leaves the glasses, respectively. The Gliss Glass gives you the sonic impression of this physical phenomenon.

“When I built the instrument, I was thinking of closed systems, such as our ecosystem or the body’s circulatory system,” she says. “There are a lot of analogies you can draw from this instrument based on hydraulic principles.”

Bobrowski created Oceans in a Box for six female vocalists and the Gliss Glass. Each vocalist plays one glass, usually one that best matches her vocal range. The piece is a structured improvisation using graphic notation that indicates valve position (see Fig. 4), glass height, glass types, and vocal sounds to be used. In the score water flow is the basic time structure rather than metronome markings. The musical result is an exquisite blend of slippery harmonics and vocal and glass textures.

Reprinted with permission from

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