Ondes Martenot: Touche
In this composition, Edmund Eagan uses his left hand not to play notes, but to provide additional control over the X,Y,Z provided by each finger in the right hand. His left hand is in a region of the playing surface that he has defined as the “Touche Area” within his EaganMatrix sound design. We have two versions of this piece; the audio performance was done eight years before the annotated video performance.
Trautonium: Two-Formant Synthesis
Edmund Eagan’s stark but beautiful sound design for this video consists of a sawtooth passing through two bandpass filters, with fine finger control of the sound parameters. This video was inspired by the Jupiter Mission section of 2001 A Space Odyssey; the canon is based on Katchaturian’s Adagio that Kubrick used in the opening of this segment. Performed using the Continuum Fingerboard’s built-in EaganMatrix sound engine, and visually overlaid with midi data from the Continuum as well as Edmund Eagan’s performance placed inside the eye of HAL 9000.
Trautonium: Pressure-sensitive Suspended Plate
Ondes Martenot: Innovative Acoustic Resonator
This video of Haken Audio’s Gesprächskonzert at SuperBooth 2018 shows Edmund Eagan and Chistophe Duquesne playing Continuum and ContinuuMini. The ContinuuMini is a simplified instrument in the Continuum family, with a Trautonium-inspired suspended plate internal to its playing surface. In the second half of the video, Ed and Christophe use Ondes in place of speakers. The Onde is like a guitar body but instead of a bridge transferring vibrations from strings, the Onde has actuators transferring vibrations from the EaganMatrix. More information about the Onde and La Voix du Luthier can be found here.
The Trautonium was first invented by Friedrich Trautwein in the 1920s, and inspired the mechanism for the ContinuuMini nearly a century later. This is the 3rd movement of the Genzmer concerto, played by Oskar Sala in 1938.
Ondioline: Jenny Oscillator
The video excerpt below has original music by Edmund Eagan performed with the Continuum’s “Jenny Trumpet” preset. (The full video is available on Youtube here.)
The EaganMatrix “Jenny Trumpet” preset incorporates Jenny Oscillators (pronounced “Genie Oscillators”). The EaganMatrix Jenny Oscillators were inspired by the analog oscillators of George Jenny, first introduced in 1939, then developed and refined for his Ondioline musical instrument. We at Haken Audio learned about the Ondioline through Australian musician Wally (Gotye) De Backer’s preservation of the Ondioline heritage.
The EaganMatrix Jenny Oscillator can sound startlingly close to original Ondiolines, but also quite different due to the unique control provided by the Continuum playing surface. This video excerpt features just one of many different sounds that can be made by skillful playing of Jenny Oscillators.