Last night I went to the opening of The Tinnitus Suites at Nothing Space and saw The Lady's Harp in all its splendor.
The experience is a bit beyond words, but I can verify that the instrument is pretty cool. Daniel manipulates the mixing boards, but the Lady's Harp really plays itself.
Photos below. Daniel says he'll be posting the recordings on Soundcloud... eventually :)
The Lady's Harp is fully assembled, and will be showing at Nothing Space over the next week. Come check it out!
Spent a little while with Daniel this AM and got some of The Lady's Harp rails built.
The two rails here are configured differently along a few dimensions. The top one uses the smaller Dayton DAEX58FP transducer, which has a fairly low profile and puts out a maximum of 40W. The lower rail uses the much heftier HDN-8, which is weatherproof and *bumps* a full 100W. Daniel wanted to try both transducers out, and so the tuning blocks (the wood parts, which have piano tuning screws in them) needed to be built at different heights.
Incidentally, these transducers are intended to be mounted to walls, floors or furniture to provide a more tactile audio experience. Imagine 100W of bone-shaking bass when you're watching a movie - I'm not sure it would be enjoyable, but I sure would like to try it out.
I also built the pickup platforms so that they can be gang-mounted (two pickups on one plate) or separated (one pickup per plate). It's possible that the pickups will want to be located at a particular node of the string, and these two configurations will allow all sorts of adjustability.
We should get the whole instrument together next week; expect updates.
I've been working with Daniel Fishkin on a electronic sound art project called The Lady's Harp. It's a large scale installation that uses acoustic feedback (from guitar pickups) looped back through contact transducers, which induce vibration on piano strings. Daniel has installed this instrument in a few other settings, but needs it to be easier to set up & tear down, so I'm helping with some basic mechanical design. We're using mostly off-the-shelf components - primarily 8020 extrusion - and a few laser cut acrylic parts.
We're mocking the components up in the next few days, and Daniel will be installing the Lady's Harp in Nothing Space later this month. I'll have more updates soon, but Daniel's description of the project is much more elegant and informative :)