I’d like to introduce my latest piece ‘Bamboo’ for two Bambusoides and Computer.

The idea came when I was writing for Petzold (modern bass recorder) and experimented feedback effects with it. What I was doing was to use microphone inside and normalized the incoming signal without any air blowing into the instrument. Then a tone is created and the keys become a harmonic modulator. I couldn’t use this technique in another piece because it is feedback sensitive, creates some risks to blow the speakers, and didn’t have enough time to make it better. But I kept the idea.

Then I had this 3 meters bambusoides from a garden store, where I wanted to explore this idea, but I didn’t start working on it. And then I really wanted to try out with several different size of bamboos.

I cut the 3 meter’s bamboo in 3 pieces, one a long, and two shorts. They of course have a different resonant frequency (let’s say, soprano and alto). More interesting aspects with working with this Bamboo is its internal structure; it has the knots that are closed inside. However I think that the bamboos for the gardening purpose are treated with fire, and there was a small hall, a couple of centimetres in diameter, inside the bamboo. Because of this, every knots has slightly different resonant frequency and I wanted to use that.

I made two holes in each knots for the small bamboos, and one hole for the long one. One bamboo has 4 holes each, and I put a little loudspeaker in one side, and DPA microphone on the other side in order to create a feedback.

I love the sound of bamboo as a percussion too, so that the piece includes all the possible characteristics of its own: its percussive aspects, cylinder shaped instrument, flute like instrument, unstable yet quite organized resonant frequency, and so on.

Below you can listen to the piece. I am preparing for the video of the premiere. I hope you enjoy.