Miles to go (2012) for four prepared and amplified toy pianos - BINAURAL

New Music by Karlheinz Essl

Binaural rendering of a live recording - listen with headphones! In "Miles to go", four toy pianists are treated as a single unit, forming a single meta-instrument. They are not merely playing different voices, but contributing to a common sound that they are creating together. The dense and fast hammering at independent tempos creates haunting phasing effects that appear as an aural rendering of the well-known visual moiré patterns. These hectic and breathless movements evoke moments of stress and unrest but at a certain point, become transformed by the listener to the opposite: a quality of calmness. Finally, another transformation takes place when the percussive attacks are gradually replaced by soft and flowing sounds, which are achieved by stroking and scratching the soundboard with the handle of a percussion mallet. Performed by Isabel Ettenauer, Jennifer Hymer, Stefan Weinzirl, Bernhard Fograscher (toy pianos), conducted by Daniel Moreira on 27 Sep 2014 at Laieszhalle, Hamburg (D) during Non-Piano / Toy Piano Weekend. Direct-to-disc recording by Karlheinz Essl (2014). Binaural rendering with IEM Ambisonics Plugins by Gerhard Eckel (December 2018). Info: http://www.essl.at/works/miles2go.html