"This thing should not exist!" or: Pain through Quadrophonics

[The Man Himself <altruist@shoko.calarts.edu>]

Here's another non-technical screeb for y'all to read in-between trading 
schematic GIFs of Echoplex noise gates.  8<[

Today I was talking to my guitar teacher, a fellow by the name of Miroslav
Tadic, who some of you may be familiar with through his work on the MA and
CMP labels, particularly in conjunction with David Torn.  Miroslav was
telling me about a project he had done about fifteen years ago involving
sending a one-note loop through a Buchla synthesizer which was panned
through a quadrophonic speaker system.  He had intended to create a
tranquil, peaceful environment where the listener could lie in the middle
of the quadrophonic sound field and bliss out while the loop circled 
around him.

What happened, however, was that Miroslav found himself getting *seasick*
from the experience.  Rather than getting the sensation of sound
travelling around his head, he found his quad loop generated the sensation
of his own body moving around the looped sound, even as he was lying on
the ground in the middle of the speaker array.  He described it as a very
disturbing sensation, remarking, "I had to wind up detroying this piece. 
I decided that this was a thing that should not exist." 

So there you have it -- looping as a means of inducing physical and 
psychological imbalance.  (And no, Paul, I don't think *that* is a feature 
the Echoplex can boast over the JamMan.  Maybe Lexicon can beat Oberheim 
to it in the upgrade wars!)

I doubt I'll be eliciting any such results in my own recital, but it 
should be interesting to see what happens when the audience is situated 
in the middle of a five-way speaker array.  Hope I don't trigger any 
seizures...

--Andre