Today was Halloween. We – as a Media Lab Experimental Music Division – were delighted to take this occasion and explore spooky sound making. Our featured instrument was theremin.

Today’s listening inspirations were clara rockmore, the soundtrack from  “the day the earth stood still”, “free music No.1 (for four theremins)” by Percy Grainger and Jimmy Page’s theremin solo in Led Zeppelin’s “whole lotta love”. After listening, we built a simple theremin from a theremin kit (big thanks to Hopkins family for generously letting us play with this!):

We took that theremin outside with 2 other mini theremins to make sound effects for our trick or treating!

Accompanied by the sounds of theremins, we walked around the Armory neighborhood, passing and greeting other ghosts and ghouls on the street. We visited houses, got a bunch of candy, and then went back to the Lab.

We started our Experimental Music class this week working with Sakiko Mori, a local composer and performer, and are very excited for a semester of experimentation!

At our first class, we listened to some field recordings of animals in the wild by Chris Watson and some recordings on the Sublime Frequencies label. We also listened to The Books and Matmos. We also listened to Trevor Wishart’s album Machine.

We then learned how to use audio recorders and went outside to do some field recording of our own. After exploring the neighborhood we came back into the Media Lab and transferred our files to the computers. We are excited to start making music with our recordings next week!