Mountainthology
Electronic Music Of West Virginia (Full)
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Mountainthology is a local public television program presented by WVPB
Mountainthology
Electronic Music Of West Virginia (Full)
Clip: Season 2025 | 9m 15sVideo has Closed Captions
Extended version of Electronic Music Of West Virginia.
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Hear?
It in.
Me?
I like electronic music, and that it can do the sorts of things that a a person cannot do.
Like it can change the, the the tuning, the characte or the instruments on the fly, which you can do with the, violin without scatting like a carpenter, like you're involved.
You can do things with rhythm and with pitch that are really difficult, for, like, a live musician to do.
You can actually create sounds that you maybe you've never heard before, or structure things in ways that are a lot freer than in something that's very regimented, like rock music or folk music is really fun.
Just to get out there and try to make new sounds that nobody else is making.
It is one thing that I will say is that the way things have evolved in the modular synth world, it seems like, it's evolved toward abstraction as far as the sound goes.
People want abstract sounds.
They are not interested in what I would call conventional music.
Or.
The reason I started getting into analog synth modules and kind of pushing the direction of the company that way, is because for a lot of people, a lot of people know me best as the pipe organ guy.
I mean, I've been working on pipe organ now for 40 years, and honestly, the business just isn't there anymore.
I had to find something else to try to diversify.
And so knowing that I love electronics and music, why not put the two together and start building modules in this way?
There's lots of other technical things that could be done, but the combination of music and electronics just made perfect sense and it was a good fit for what I knew.
So coming over here, we have a couple of modules which we've more recently designed, these ones that here that we jokingly called a filter Natur because they are both sort of a filter and a resonator.
And when you turn them up.
They give you a very they can create a very thin sound in them.
Or they can take the high sounds out and leave you just with low sounds like this.
So on the other half of Canal Music, after all the design work's done, or most of the design work's done.
Chris, hands off the modules to me, and, I try to break them.
I have automated it, so I have solenoids that are that are triggered by Midi, and then I have a microphone in this box sending it to the rest of the your racks system.
It's also powering these motors.
So I can include, any kind of animatronics in my performance.
So this is a scope is displaying the waveform that this mess over here i creating this prototype module, which eventually will be made into a form like one of these over here.
But for now, this is a test to see the proof of concept and what's happening is that it's putting out a triangle wave, both in a regular version and an inverted version, so we can have.
Like that.
And we can speed it up.
Or some way down.
So the sound change is very gradual.
Or anywhere in between.
Chris is a classical music guy.
I grew up in the performance art world studying sculpture and printmaking.
So, my sensibilities in how I perform are completely different, and I love that.
Where did the modular synthesizer first come to public notice in a big way.
It was with Wendy Carlos with Switched on Bach, which was completely recorded on modular synthesizers and sold millions of copies.
So in some ways, I think, you know, what I'm doing here is going back to its roots.
The standard orchestra, classical, instruments, acousti instruments aren't going away.
I mean, we have, we have like, centuries of music written for those.
And people like listening to that stuff.
I like listening to that stuff.
Electronica musi is a relatively new invention.
Yeah.
I mean, it's it's it' been around for about a century.
That's, that's still relatively new.
And, we're still trying to figure out ways to, Meltham.
There have been some, very interesting, interesting and wonderful, melding of both electronic and classical music.
Just, in the strings worlds, you have, very recently, in the past few years, concertos written for electric violin and orchestra.
I use a, seven string left you violin.
It's called a viper.
It's, made by Mark wood.
And that runs through into this blue pedal here.
And this is, my synthesizer.
It's, I can produce a lot of different sounds with it.
So it's right now on a kind of a, distorted square wave, which.
Then from there, it goes to, into this pedal, and that's my delay pedal.
What it does is it produces, echoes of it.
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Clip: S2025 | 9m 24s | Extended version of No Options Stories in West Virginia Hip Hop (9m 24s)
Electronic Music Of West Virginia (Full)
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Clip: S2025 | 9m 15s | Extended version of Electronic Music Of West Virginia. (9m 15s)
Dr. Ted Olson - Appalachian Music Historian
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Clip: S2025 | 8m 48s | Extended version of Dr. Ted Olson - Appalachian Music Historian. (8m 48s)
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