Last week at Sonic Arts, we invited Tom Nunn and his wife Pricilla, from San Francisco, for an anniversary visit. Thirty years ago, we met through a friend and soon started the ID Project. We performed all over the West with our invented instruments. We gave workshops, showed people how to make instruments and created improvisational music and dance pieces.
Tom has honed his craft, making electro-acoustic percussion boards and "Crustations" (thin stainless steel plates with rods welded on, supported by balloons in buckets. His book on the theory and practice of improvisation, "The Wisdom of Impulse" is available through our website.
We recorded music from Toms "T-Rodimba" (bent threaded rods attached by nuts and washers in "V" shapes for easy access) and a couple of other percussion boards. These rods (on the T-Rodimba) are tuned to an eight tone octatonic scale of half notes and whole notes sometimes used by jazz composers. We will have a recording available soon of last weeks music. Also in the mix was the "Nail Violin" played by its invertor, Bill Wesley. There will also be music for the nail violin available soon.
Tonalsoft Inc. has arrived with its "Catalina" version of the microtonal software of the future. We have new features on this version, the main one of which is the exportation of Tonescape Musical Pieces as MIDI files. We don't yet have a specific release date for the final public version (it will sometime in late 2005), but we are always looking for people who will give us feedback. If you are one of those people, please email us at monz@tonalsoft.com.