Trimpin

Trimpin's work integrates sculpture and sound across a variety of media including fixed installation and live music, theater, and dance performance.

[9] In 1980 Trimpin moved to America because he needed access to old, used technological components, which were difficult to find in Europe;[1][5] he settled in Seattle because it "sounded like a nice place to live".

[8] One of his early installations was a six-story-high microtonal xylophone (that is, one with smaller intervals between achievable tones than in conventional Western musical scales) running through a spiral staircase in an Amsterdam theater, with computer-driven melodies ripping up and down it.

[4] Trimpin has invented a gamelan whose iron bells are suspended in air by electronic magnets; a photo sensor prevents them from rising past a certain point, and since they don't touch anything, once rung they will sound with a phenomenally long decay.

Trimpin already had the technology to convert Nancarrow's player piano rolls into MIDI information, thus saving their contents from potential deterioration and disaster.

[4] An outlier to the method audiences normally experience his work, the tornado-shaped column of self-tuning guitars called IF VI WAS IX: Roots and Branches,[12] installed in Seattle's Museum of Popular Culture, uses electric guitars and an array of headphones due to the constraints of the space and neighboring exhibitions.

[6] More recently, he was an invited keynote speaker at the 7th International NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) conference in New York City, in June 2007.

[18] Trimpin's water-based sound sculpture "Sheng High" was exhibited during the 2009 Ojai Music Festival, and one of his creations was featured in one of the pieces performed on the last evening.

Since Fall 2010, Trimpin has been working with students and faculty at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) to create the multimedia installation "The Gurs Zyklus."

The audience was able to activate a composition by manoeuvering an arcade style game joystick which in turn moved an RGB colour sensor suspended on the wall.

The sensor was positioned in front of an array of primary colour silk screened posters, also made by Trimpin.

After a position was selected, the listener could push a button located next to the joystick, the sensor would scan the colour and utilize the information in a composition choosing algorithm.

The documentary subsequently screened at film festivals in New York, London, Toronto, Barcelona, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, Dublin, Goteborg, Oslo, and New Zealand.

The book was compiled and edited by Anne Focke with contributions from many of Trimpin's friends and collaborators including Kyle Gann, Charles Amirkhanian and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet.