page_title: Trimpin
section_title: Inventions
hierarchical_section_title: Trimpin / Inventions
caption_attribution_description: English: The Sound Arch (by Trimpin) is in Libbey Park at the entrance of Libbey Bowl (seen in the background).
context_page_description: Trimpin is a German born kinetic sculptor, sound artist, and musician currently living in Seattle, Washington, United States.
  Trimpin's work integrates sculpture and sound across a variety of media including fixed installation and live music, theater, and dance performance. His works are known to be electromechanically actuated by embedded microcontrollers that communicate digitally through MIDI.
context_section_description: 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. Another piece was a water fountain installation in which drops of water, timed in complex rhythmic fugues, dripped into glass receptacles. Several of his pieces since that time have made similar use of falling water. A dance piece used the dancers' bodies to make music, with small bellows in the dancers' shoes that played duck calls, air blowers triggered by sacs under their armpits, etc.
  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. Another invention is an extra-long bass clarinet. Extra keys spiraled around the instrument allow a microtonal scale. A human blows through the mouthpiece; the dozens of extra keys are played via computer. In 1987 he met Conlon Nancarrow, composer of experimental player piano music unplayable by a human pianist. Trimpin already had the technology to convert Nancarrow's player piano rolls into MIDI information, thus saving their contents from potential deterioration and disaster.
  Trimpin has invented machines to play every instrument of the orchestra via MIDI commands. His mechanical cello can achieve virtually unnoticeable bow changes, and his MIDI timpani can be rubbed quickly by the mallet, for a timpani drone unachievable by human hands. Indeed, his pieces do not generally try to imitate human playing. "What I'm trying to do," he has remarked, "is go beyond human physical limitations to play instruments in such a way that no matter how complex the composition of the timing, it can be pushed over the limits."
  Although most of his music is composed digitally, Trimpin almost never uses electronic sounds — not because he objects to them on principle — but because he asserts that loudspeaker design, mostly unchanged for 100 years, has lagged behind the rest of electronic music technology. 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, installed in Seattle's Experience Music Project, uses electric guitars and an array of headphones due to the constraints of the space and neighboring exhibitions.
caption: The Sound Arch in Libbey Park
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