The MUSICAL SHOES are four ordinary shoes mounted upside-down on stands and plugged into electronics, which are activated by striking the shoes. No digital sampling or MIDI is involved-but by opening audio gates the SHOES turn the whole world into a giant sound sampler. "The performer-equipment connection is too often obscure-the computer a black box, leaving the audience in the dark. Shoe Music makes the connections clear."

A pick-up is imbedded in the heel of each shoe. Each pick-up is wired to a noise gate, which releases a bit of any ongoing source material at the instant the shoe is struck. The source can be anything-"Shoes, Loops, and FM Radio" uses found sound grabbed off the radio, live. The gates (actually expanders) are dynamics-sensitive, and the release time of each is variable. Shoe Music tries to expose technology by turning it inside out: recording equipment is designed to turn ephemeral live events into something static (for the purpose of mass production)-here that same equipment is reformulated as a live instrument. The "noise gate" is usually thought of as a means of carefully controlling musical content in a recording studio, and is normally used to shut out extraneous, "unwanted" instrumental sounds. Here the gate itself becomes the instrument and the means of determining which sounds are "wanted."

Constructed, Composed, and Performed by: Joshua Fried

Back to Concert Report of The Musical Shoes

Back to Concert 3