Thursday

Sound waves

Waves at St Cecilia’s Hall, Tour 1: Acoustical waves. How do musical instruments work?
Tour | 11am | St Cecilia’s Hall

Good vibrations: Performing Alvin Lucier’s The Queen of the South
Workshop | 2pm | Reid Concert Hall


Waves at St Cecilia’s Hall, Tour 1:
Acoustical waves. How do musical instruments work?

Tour | 11am | St Cecilia’s Hall

Book your place (free) here

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This tour explores the galleries at St Cecilia’s Hall focussing on how sounds are made and the purposes of the different parts of musical instruments. Led by Dr Jenny Nex, Curator of the Musical Instrument Collection and Lecturer in Musical Instruments at the Reid School of Music.


Good vibrations: Performing Alvin Lucier’s The Queen of the South

Workshop | 2pm | Reid Concert Hall

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Alvin Lucier’s piece The Queen of the South (1972) invites performers to a musical exploration of a technique developed by the eighteenth-centry German physicist Ernst Chladni (see image above) to study and demonstrate the action of sound vibrations on physical objects. The text score instructs performers on any suitable instrument to play in such a way that material such as sand strewn on specially arrange, responsive sheets begins to form distinctive patterns and figures, thus ‘making visible the effects of sound’. This workshop provides a chance for performers on any sustaining instrument to explore the techniques and setup necessary to realise this work and to learn about the science behind it.

While the workshop is directed primarily at staff and students of Edinburgh College of Art, members of the wider community in Edinburgh who are interested in attending are invited to contact us by email. The process and outcomes will be documented on the Week of Sound website. Staff and students should register through their university account here.

The image shows a table illustrating the results of some of Chladni’s experiments with resonant plates, from Ernst Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (1787). © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, rightsstatements.org/page/NoC-NC/1.0/