The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

PipaBiwa and Slover

Listen to the pipa:

Listening to biwa recently; it relates to the pipa and oud. So thinking
through biwa through pipa, and for once pipa pieces that can hold their
own without falling back into Chinese traditional sounds. So it relates to
the old pipa tradition - a somewhat different instrument, played with a
large pick, held horizontally. But then it's reversed again, I'm not using
picks at all, opting for nylon-wound pipa ADE, and nylon a, instead of
metal; my nails remain intact. So then the nail techniques are from
everywhere, including cura cumbus, saz, classical guitar, all oddly picked
themselves. So then the music has a lot of rat-a-tat and puncta combined
with banjo and ukulele techniques thinking through martial pipa but more
likely tales of the Heike.
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/pipabiwa1.mp3
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/pipabiwa2.mp3
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/pipabiwa3.mp3

Then there's the din software, described by James Morris (thanks!), which
I installed in Ubuntu, not without difficulty; it's used as you might
suppose for a drone piece that's only 160k mp3, since it's going into a
Second Life installation; it's somewhat interesting. You can 'play' the
software in interesting ways, and its quirkiness - which reminds me of
AudioMulch - is fascinating.
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/slover.mp3