Demo Hour

DEMO HOUR: Au Clair de la Lune on Gramophone

This work realizes Moholy-Nagy's provocative idea of "a record without prior acoustic information" (1923) with the help of modern audio technology and personal fabrication tools. In this work, I reproduced a French folk song, "Au Clair de la Lune" (1860), the oldest recorded music by Léon Scott, in the form of a record for a gramophone. Instead of using a recording of the music, I computationally drew a vector waveform with Adobe Illustrator by calculating the frequency of every note of the music. I then horizontally engraved the waveform onto a lacquered anodized aluminum plate with a laser cutter.

Jo, K. Au Clair de La Lune on Gramophone "For Édouard-Léon Scott and László Moholy-Nagy" (1860/1923/2015). Proc. of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. ACM, New York, 2018, 517–520; https://doi.org/10.1145/3173225.3173300

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-record-without-prior-acoustic-inform/

https://vimeo.com/266441538/

Kazuhiro Jo, Kyushu University/YCAM
[email protected]

A record made from a computationally drawn waveform engraved onto a lacquered anodized aluminum plate sits atop a gramophone.