Handheld Audio Art Devices, article published in June at http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/12_3/

eContact! is the Canadian Electroacoustic Community’s (CEC) online journal of electroacoustics launched in May 1998 as the successor to its print journal, Contact! …published four times a year in French and English. Guest editors have been invited to coordinate one issue per year. Articles, reviews, interviews, commentaries and analyses are featured in the journal, supported by audio and video files. All freely available to the public.

For the “Instrument—Interface” issue I described my personal encounters with two simple hand-held audio devices: self-built piezo disk contact microphones and inductors. These two very inexpensive electronic components enable anyone to extend hand movement into electronic sound that possess analogous gestural qualities and movement of the original hand movement. (This feature may seem trivial at first, but as an audio artist quickly discovers, imparting the same nuance and variability to electronically generated sounds as acoustic ones is not simple, nor haptically immediate.)

When equipped with digital multi-track recording and free VST and Audio Units (AU) processing plugins, these extended gestures provide a rich set of sounds and compositional ideas. An example can be heard in the piece I composed last May for Plasticene’s “From a Fading Light.”

Direct link to my article: http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/12_3/leonardson_devices.html

CEC’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Canadian-Electroacoustic-Community/178176036280

I’d like to thank Anna Friz, Arlene Walters, Tom Erbe, Michael Norris, and Nobuyasu Sakonda for their contributions and support in making the sounds for Plasticene’s “From a Fading Light.”