Aeolian Harp - v1

vaisvil

this is a 15 minute excerpt of my first successful aeolian harp experiment. As you can see from the picture I strung 50 pound fishing line from my deck to my fence. I used piezo pickups clamped to the end of the lines to capture the sound. The lines were so long the fundamental was well below the range of hearing – if one struck a string it sounded like an echo. Normally Aeolian harps only sound the harmonics and in this case it would be impossible to hear the fundamental anyway. Because I had to use a hugh amount of amplification I acquired a great deal of noise in the signal which I then reduced via FFT noise reduction. The constant background is a residual of that noise. (not unpleasant to me though monotonous after a while) I intend to improve on my design – the extreme length of string is for two purposes 1. to capture as much wind as possible. 2. to experiment with long string playing as done by Ellen Fullman.