Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes

1962

György Ligeti

From Wikipedia:

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti composed Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes in 1962, during his brief acquaintance with the Fluxus movement.

The piece requires ten “performers”, and most of their efforts take place without the audience present. Each of the hundred metronomes is set up on the performance platform, and they are all then wound to their maximum extent and set to different speeds. Once they are all fully wound they are all started as simultaneously as possible. The performers then leave. The audience is then admitted, and take their places while the metronomes are all ticking. As the metronomes wind down one after another and stop, periodicity becomes noticeable in the sound, and individual metronomes can be more clearly made out. The piece typically ends with just one metronome ticking alone for a few beats.

[The User] :: The Symphony #1 for dot matrix printers - 1998 

i’m looking forward to the a/visions series this year at mutek!

The Symphony for dot matrix printers is a work which transforms obsolete office technology into an instrument for musical performance. The Symphony focuses the listener’s attention on a nearly forgotten technology: the dot matrix printer. Specifically, it employs the noises the printers make as the sole sound source for a musical composition. Leaving the constituent elements untouched, the process imposes a new order upon them, reorganizing the sounds along a musical structure.

[The User] ::: Coincidence Engine One: Universal People’s Republic Time - 2008

Installation for 1200 battery-powered alarm clocks, CNC cut Styrofoam structure. 

read more about [The User] on Mutek’s blog.

Analog Digital Clock by Maarten Baas

iPhone version of his “Real Time” clock, which he presented at last year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan

previously: Standard Time