Dan Trueman Discovers an Electric Violin

7/29/2019 Dan Trueman Discovers an Electric Violin

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www.americancomposers.org/trueman_essay.htm

Discovering an

Electric Violin

by Dan Trueman

It was my first "concert" with electric violin. I had been playing electric violin for

quite some time, but always in clubs, with weird rock bands, singing harmonies,

using distortion and a big electric guitar tube amplif ier. But this was a "concert,"

in a concert hall with nice acoustics at a conservatory and (mostly) attentive

listeners. So I lugged in my Fender amp, my Alesis Quadraverb (a digital effects

unit), my MIDI foot-pedal and my flying-V, strap-on 6-string fretted electric violin

(made by Mark Wood), and played. Though I grew up playing chamber music,performing with orchestras, and doing "concerts" on a regular basis, it had been

many years since I had played in a "concert" setting, and it felt simultaneously

foreign and familiar.

I learned so much in that concert. Let me start with the details, because that's

where the whole process began for me. I set up the amplifier facing the audience,

and sat down next to it with my foot-pedal. Usually, at home or in a club, I'm

standing facing my amplifier, getting it full blast in the face. But I had to sit for

this (needing both feet for some complicated foot-pedal maneuvers) and didn't

really think facing the amplifier would be appropriate I'd be blocking the sound

and, regardless of Miles Davis's example, I didn't think I could play with my back

to the audience. So I sat down next to the amp and played. It was shocking howdifferent it sounded to me than when I was face to face with the amp. All the high

frequencies were gone, so I began compensating by hitting the high strings hard

and the lightening up on the low strings. I was also puzzled by the sound of my instrument in the

hall. It was clear that people in the central seats were getting a decent sound from the amp, but as

wandered the hall with a long cord, I could hear that anyone outside of the central seating was also

missing the high frequencies; what an awful sound!

I also noticed something subtler, but in some ways even more deeply troubling, and it wasn't until

several years later that I was really able to put my finger on the difficulty. The acoustic

instrumentalists I was playing with on that concert filled the hall beautifully; it was as if their

instrument and the hall were one, working together symbiotically. My own instrument, on the other

hand, sounded like it was from another world. Oil and water. I messed with the reverb on my amp,to try to get it to sound better. I turned the reverb off, but then it sounded just terrible; dry and

ugly, and instead of hearing the warm sound of the hall, all I could hear was the sound of my

instrument bouncing off the back wall, l ike an echo. In the end, it was an intractable problem; oil

and water it was, at least for that concert. The only thing I could think to do was to put mics on the

acoustic instruments and put us all through a PA, so we could be artificially mixed and essentially

bypass the acoustics of the hall, but there wasn't time, and it just seemed like an unsatisfying non-

solution.

Finally, my solid-body electric violin sounded painfully coarse in the same room as these fine old

acoustic instruments, in spite of my best efforts to tweak the equalization (I have spent untold hours

messing with EQ and electric violins). These instruments, with their piezo pickups directly under the


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strings in the bridges, produce a remarkably clean signal, one that can be quite effective when

processed, but one that is decidedly bland and even (to my ears) ugly when compared to most

acoustic instruments. And, between my stomping on the foot-pedals to try to control the effects box

and negotiating my fretted, undeniably phallic strap-on instrument, I felt a bit like a zoo animal.

So I played the concert (it went ok, though was an unsatisfying musical/sonic experience for me)

and spent the next several months wondering if I could ever make "concert" music with the electric

violin. Now, I'm well aware of the current trend in concert music to amplify everything, make it

loud, and bypass the natural acoustics of performance spaces, and I quite enjoy it at times, both as

a player and listener, but I also feel like it shouldn't be the only option when we are interested incombining old instruments with new technologies in spaces that have their own beautiful acoustic

properties. I also have a social problem with it; while it is certainly possible to make things sound

good in a hall when you have a good system and good engineers, and it is even often possible to

arrange for a decent monitoring system for the musicians, it is undeniably a different social

experience for the musicians to make music in this kind of context. It is so different that not only is

the performer's musical experience deeply impacted, our whole notion of how we make music and

what kind of music we will make is changed. This is not just a practical matter, this is a musical,

aesthetic matter, and we should have options so we aren't using a PA simply because that is our

only choice.

From my point of view at the time, there were Three Problems: 1) the tone of my instrument and

EQ; 2) the amplifiers/speakers; 3) the foot-pedal as controller for signal processing. I don't think Iwould have made much progress on any of these fronts if I hadn't had the opportunity to work with

Perry Cook, a computer scientist, engineer, and musician at Princeton, where I became a graduate

student the year after my formative concert experience. With Perry, I embarked on two separate

projects to address the Three Problems.

For Problem #1, we decided to study the natural EQ that instrument bodies create when they filter

the sounds of strings being driven through them. This is, after all, the missing element in a solid-

body instrument. We went about taking what are called "impulse responses" for a variety of violins,

guitars, and mandolins. Here's the idea: you whack the bridge of the instrument with a very small

hammer, and record the way the body colors that sound (the strings are left on, but damped). This

response then serves as a model for building an equalization filter that you can then use with an

electric violin (or any other sound, for that matter). Engineers have done this kind of thing foryears, and it is analogous to the way reverbs are built these days; generate an impulse (via firing a

pistol or something similar) in a concert hall, record the way that impulse is dissipated, and that

becomes your model for building a reverb (or in the case of some recent reverbs like Altiverb, the

response is used directly to create reverb via a process known as convolution). But instead of just

recording the response with a single mic, we set up an array of twelve microphones pointing

inwards so we could see how the sound of the instrument varied in space.


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An array of 12 microphones, with an instrument inside

So we went about whacking the bridges of several instruments and collecting sets of 12 "directional

impulse responses" which could be used to create EQs for my electric violin.

Simultaneous with this process, I was thinking about Problem #2. Taking it step by step, I thought

things might be improved if I used two speakers: one for the audience and one for me. This way I

could hear the high frequencies and feel more comfortable with the sound of the instrument. Of

course, it would stil l sound lousy to the musicians on stage with me. Ok, then let's try three

speakers, adding one for the other musicians. Well, you need more than three if you have more

than one other musician, so let's keep adding. Finally, it occurred to me that maybe we could set up

an array of speakers pointing outwards, arranged like a sphere. Without having any idea how this

might be done, I mentioned the idea to Perry and his eyes lit up. A couple days later he invited me

over to his house to see something he had built:


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Looking like something that NASA might build if they could only shop at Home Depot, the Boulder

was the inverse of the microphone array we were using to collect impulse responses: a set of 12

speakers pointing outwards. Now we could take the impulse responses we were collecting, apply

them to my electric violin through these 12 speakers and create a virtual replica of the acoustic

qualities of the instruments we had abused. Thus our first spherical speaker was born (I should poin

out that spherical speakers have been used since the 1950s, though primarily for acoustic studies,

not as musical instruments).

I noticed something remarkable when I started playing with the Boulder (and the Bomb, a spherical

speaker made out of two metal salad bowls, and later, R2, a speaker made out of two wooden salad

bowls and tom-tom legs): I didn't need reverb anymore. With the sound of my electric violin coming

out all directions, it was filling the hall more like acoustic instruments doI was actually engaging

the acoustic qualities of the performance space, and getting the natural reverb that acoustic


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musicians are accustomed to (and boy was it fun to bring it into the bathroom!). This was

particularly true when using the 12 EQs from the impulse responses, but even with a mono signal

going through the speaker I was able to get a full, reverberant sound. This was a revelation, and I

have been using spherical speakers (or, more recently, hemispherical speakers, which are excellent

as well) ever since.

It is difficult to overstate the impact these speakers have had on my subsequent work. After buildin

a few speakers by hand and coming up with a more refined design (with my father, physicist Larry

Trueman), I began (with my long time collaborate Curtis Bahn) to pursue manufacturers in the hope

of having many of these speakers built. At RPI, Curtis eventually initiated a project where they builtover 50 hemispherical speakers, which in turn spawned a mini-business (see

http://www.oddnoise.com/spheres.html) intended to meet the requests of several other artists

interested in using them. Over the years, my electronic improvisation ensemble interface (with

Curtis and the dancer/shakuhachi player Tomie Hahn) has performed regularly with them,

sometimes using dozens of them at a time. interface had always performed with a PA system, and i

was remarkable how much our music changed when we started using the new speakers. The

speakers have a sense ofpresence in a space; they are definable, localized sources of sounds, like

old fashioned musical instruments. They also help create a sense ofintimacyrare in electronic

music; rather than hurling sound at an audience from behind the plane of separation that PA

systems create between an audience and performers, we felt like we could create delicate sonic

spaces that invited listeners to lean forward, and even enter our space and walk around. With these

speakers, the whole notion of the on-stage monitor becomes irrelevant; the speakers areinstruments, and we simply set the volume to whatever sounds appropriate. This has noticeable

social ramifications; when we play, it feels more like an old fashioned chamber music experience

than the familiar PA/monitor situation. Our improvisations began to change, becoming more

detailed, with a wider dynamic range (particularly on the quiet side).

I found all of this tremendously inspiring, and began to compose chamber pieces that combined my

electric violin and spherical speakers with cellos, violin, guitars, percussion, etc.... My first

electronic chamber piece, Machine Language, was for electric violin (no fancy signal processing or

laptop, just a single spherical speaker for the sound of the e-violin), violin, cello and percussion.

This was followed by a trio, Still, for violin, cello, and electric violin/laptop (which was premiered at

the ACO's first OrchestraTech festival in 2001) that introduced noisy electronic textures into the

ensemble (using three spherical speakers, one for the electric violin, two for the electronics, allplaced in and around the ensemble). My next piece, Counterfeit Curio, for

Pierrot/percussion/electric-violin/laptop, required more speakers to match the size of the ensemble,

so I used four hemispherical speakers (by now I had decided that hemispheres were actually more

appropriate than spheres, spheres being almost too reverberant). Emboldened, I entered the most

challenging of chamber music contexts with the piece Traps, for string quartet and electric

violin/laptop; with Traps, the four hemispherical speakers sit discretely on the floor, one near each

player, and the electronics create a kind of gentle sonic halo from within the ensemble.

Over the course of composing these pieces, the speakers went through many changes, and I also

continued to explore different kinds of electric violins. I eventually abandoned the strap-on flying-V

instrument (though I still have it!) and went through several other designs, all solid-body. Finally, in

the summer of 2002 I commissioned a 6-string acoustic/electric violin from Eric Aceto. Thisinstrument has a full resonating body (but no F-holes), and rather than having pickups directly unde

the strings, the pickup is on the top of the violin and gets a spectrally rich sound, colored by the

body of the instrument.


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Also, having a full resonant body, the instrument can take the full weight of the bow arm; one of the

ironic things I found with solid-body instruments is that, in spite of their ability to be very loud, you

can't really sink the bow into themthere is no place for the energy to go, so the strings just give

out. I also found that with the Aceto instrument, the need for applying equalization to the sound

goes away; the resonating body takes care of that.

So, it is with this wonderful new Aceto electric violin and eight hemispherical speakers that I join th

ACO on January 21. Traps Relaxed, for strings, percussion and electric violin/laptop, is a re-imagining of my earlier piece for string quartet and electric violin/laptop. With both Traps and Traps

Relaxed, I am exploring a subtle algorithm where the sound of my violin is cut into tiny pieces

(grains), transposed, and scattered across the speakers within the ensemble. The algorithm

attempts to transpose my sound to a given "trap" pitch (or pitches). So, if the trap pitch is a high F,

and I play an A below that, it will transpose my sound up a minor sixth:


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Listen: http://silvertone.princeton.edu/~dan/traps_examples_web/0.9.mp3

(the little high F indicates the trap pitch)

Sometimes, however, it will also still remember notes I had played slightly earlier, so if I played a

low D and then returned to the high A, we might also hear a bit of Bb (the D transposed up a minor

sixth):

Listen: http://silvertone.princeton.edu/~dan/traps_examples_web/1.mp3

(note that in this sound example, I repeat the low D a couple times, so this notation is incompleteand shows only the first low D)

Or, I might have two trap notes, so we get a richer sonority:


And one of my favorite examples:


(note how when I play the low double stop we can hear a noisy spattering of grains; these are the

algorithm's attempt to transpose that low double-stop up to the high trap A).


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Both Traps and Traps Relaxedgo through a series of "traps," exploring their various harmonic and

textural possibilities. Traps Relaxedis a bit more expansive than the original Traps, lingering in

places, discovering new possibilities that the larger ensemble allows.

The electric "violin" (which includes the Aceto, the speakers, and the laptop) that I will be using in

Traps Relaxedis one of the main instruments that I am working with these days, and I am thrilled

to have the opportunity to try with the ACO at Zankel; each new piece, ensemble and hall that I play

these instruments in brings new revelations. I have never used them with such a large ensemble (1

instruments); if all goes well I'll try 16 hemispheres (or more) with a full orchestra!

Some of you are probably wondering about Problem #3 (the Foot-Pedal as Controller for Signal

Processing Problem). It is beyond the scope of this article to describe what we've been doing to

address this problem, but I will leave you with what I hope will be an intriguing image:

This is the Bowed-Sensor-Speaker-Array (BoSSA), an instrument I built that takes its inspiration

from the violin. It consists of: a spherical speaker; a violin bow with sensors that detect bow

position, speed, pressure; an ebony fingerboard with sensors that detect finger position; and a set

of sensors arranged like a "bridge" that can be bowed. The data from these sensors are used to

control synthesis and signal processing algorithms on a laptop, which in turn sends sound out the

twelve elements of the spherical speaker. It sort of feels like a cello to play, with the speaker sitting


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www americancomposers org/trueman essay htm

in my lap. Sort of.... If you are intrigued, check out a video ofBoSSA here and visit the BoSSA

website.BoSSA is also the inspiration for PLOrk (the Princeton Laptop Orchestra), a new ensemble

being formed at Princeton that combines a dozen hemispherical speakers with a variety of

sensor/control devices; stay tuned!

Buy Tickets Online:

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or call212-247-7800

About the Jan. 21, 2005 "Orchestra Underground" Concert

Related Articles:

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Dan Trueman Discovers an Electric Violin

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