Specialising and Exhibiting

Field Recordings & Conceptual Ideas

In the mid-1700s, Benjamin Franklin served as a delegate for colonial America and spent a great deal of time traveling to London and Paris. During this period, it was quite popular and entertaining for amateur musicians to perform on sets of “singing” or musical glasses. Franklin attended one of these concerts and was intrigued by the beauty of the sound. Almost immediately, he set to work applying the principles of wet fingers on glass to his own musical creation.

Ben Franklin completed his glass armonica in 1761. (Its name is derived from the Italian word for harmony.) He didn’t simply refine the idea of musical glasses, which were played much like children at the dinner table play them today, with notes being determined by the amount of water in the glass. Rather, Franklin made chords and lively melodies possible on his new instrumental invention.

Working with a glassblower in London, Franklin made a few dozen glass bowls, tuned to notes by their varying size and fitted one inside the next with cork. Each bowl was made with the correct size and thickness to give the desired pitch without being filled with any water. Franklin also painted them so that each bowl was color-coded to a different note. A hole was put through the center of the glass bowls, and an iron rod ran through the holes. The rod was attached to a wheel, which was turned by a foot pedal. Moistened fingers touched to the edge of the spinning glasses produced the musical sounds.

My friend and I tried to use glass to generate sounds (putting finger into the water and touch the lid of it) and it worked really well as a sample base. I mixed the sound with wine glasses with bright piano, and it sounded like glass harmonica.

Mid frequency baby is here!

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1WP4y1U7KR/

（Sorry mistaken words it is golden hour as a ref)

I found a Zheng artist Tang Jiaxuan who is graduated from Gold smith and would like to improvise Zheng for my piece. I really love the sounds generated by Zheng, they were like butterflies which were buzzing around your heart. I used contact mic and zoom h3 for recording it and I did say I would not want it sound like Chinese instrument. ( I love the voice of Zheng instead of having it as a Chinese instrument)

Then I was thinking: May be I need to find a wind baby which wold be matched with the Zheng&Piano with quite strong intensity.

I invited Ms Caroline to improvise the flute the section. It was not take for long, I used akg condense microphones to record two times only. We were talking about artists like Brian Eno and Olivier Messiaen. I asked her try to follow the same pitches I played as the first time and played randomly second time.

One thing I was keep doing is I always asked musicians to improvise their own melodies with listening my improvisations in headphones! What’s more, I always tell them to focus on the space, which meant not playing it all the time. I know classical trained perfectionists are really struggling with themselves on playing notes all right in one time, but my piece is more like a collage. You just stay in the comfort zone. And I will do the editing.

I got this new lovely tongue drum for this composition as well. It was transpose +16 than the other one and getting almost most of the black keys, which would be really helpful at my position. Cause the other one is in C major, and getting no black keys. This drum has small tiny metallic kits which I could change the pitches.

I was inspired by the sounds from my rooftops so I really desired to record an immersive raining environment. I was watching on the weather report. It said it would be raining at 2am Tuesday but it did not turn out. So I waited until 5 am. It was raining slightly so I recorded using an ambisonic and a parabolic microphone in the garage and got half of the job done. I also wanted to record he raining sounds in the tunnel so I went to the Waterloo train station and got some nice raining sounds there. Some of them were totally like fake rains (raindrops) but they were still nice.