Reinventing Quadraphonic Sound
The ATLAS Sound Lab class, led by teaching associate professor David Schaal, developed a new electronic instrument in the final group project, "Nyckelharpa Interactive Spatial Drone".
KC Yeneza, Composer
David Schaal, Mentor
Wayne Seltzer, Mentor
Mayla Seliskar, Instrument Developer
Kyle Smith and Ryan Stewart, Spatial Audio Designer
Zixiao Wang and Woong Huh, Interactive Hardware Designers
Our Story
In November, Catherine Christer Hennix, one of the electronic musics' pioneers, passed away(1948-2023). She was a Swedish musician and mathematician who experimented with drone sounds. Our class was inspired to honor and recognize her influence and work by creating a drone sound composition that combined what students learned over the semester: sampled VST instrument creation, modular synthesis and spatial audio.
Project Break-Down
Mayla Seliskar attended a concert by the Wind Earth Ensemble at Nevei Kodesh and was able to sample the Nyckelharpa, a rare Swedish 16-string instrument, during sound check from musician Sandra Wong. Mayla then designed and programmed a sampled instrument that can be downloaded from the ATLAS Institute GitHub.
I created a drone sound composition using the sampled instrument in Ableton.
Kyle Smith and Ryan Stewart set up the multichannel audio system (inspired by Jerry Laiserin's audio donation) and created an interactive spatial panning effect by tweaking a Max for Live patch, using a quadraphonic sound system.
Finally Zixiao Wang and Woong Huh used what they learned from assistant professor adjunct Wayne Seltzer's Arduino MIDI workshop to build a custom joystick interface to control the spatial audio live.