from wikipedia
Tape-bow violin
The tape-bow violin is an instrument created by Laurie Anderson in 1977. It uses recorded magnetic tape in place of the traditional hair in the bow, and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. Anderson has updated and modified this device over the years. She can be seen using a later generation of this device in her film,
Home of the Brave, during the "Late Show" segment in which she manipulates a sentence recorded by William S. Burroughs. (This version of the violin discarded magnetic tape, and actually used MIDI-based audio samples, triggered by contact with the bow.)
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Talking stick
The talking stick is a six-foot long, batonlike
MIDI controller. It was used in the Moby Dick tour in 1999-2000. She described it in program notes:
The Talking Stick is a new instrument that I designed in collaboration with a team from
Interval Research and Bob Bielecki. It is a wireless instrument that can access and replicate any sound. It works on the principle of granular synthesis. This is the technique of breaking sound into tiny segments, called grains, and then playing them back in different ways. The computer rearranges the sound fragments into continuous strings or random clusters which are played back in overlapping sequences to create new textures. The grains are very short, a few hundredths of a second. Granular synthesis can sound smooth or choppy depending on the size of the grain and the rate at which they’re played. The grains are like film frames. If you slow them down enough you begin to hear them separately.