Mission Hypnotic : Earth Wind & Wire

Earth Wind & Wire is the result of an installation I created at Burning Man 2004. As an extension of my work using random waveform LFO's to trigger audio samples (see Urban Paradise and Doozvillnavava) I created a MIDI wind chime which allows the random motion of the wind to trigger electronic sounds.

The MIDI wind chime is constructed like a conventional wind chime except each of the 6 chimes are solid acrylic rods with piezo transducers attached to them. The piezo transducers connect to the trigger inputs on an Alesis D4 drum module and the MIDI output from the D4 is routed to an E-Mu Morpheus synth module. For each of the six chimes a distinctive and contrasting sound has been programmed in the Morpheus.

For the Burning Man installation the Morpheus was amplified with a boom box so that the sounds triggered by the wind chime could be heard in real time as it was activated by the wind. For Earth Wind & Wire I recorded some of the MIDI output during the Burning Man installation and then played the sequence back in my studio and recorded and mixed the six stereo tracks output from the Morpheus. The dynamics of the recording range from total silence when there is no wind to frantic noise when the wind is more intense.