Postcard Carnival

ing of subtle rat noises played for the duration of the installation. I had hoped to make a room for rats in which they could stay comfortably , yet leave anytime that they wanted. But since I did not want to show my rat friends as art objects for the viewers, there were no live rats in the exhibition space. Instead, the spirit of the rats was present. POSTCARD CARNIvAL Michael S. Horwood, 8 Grovetree PI., Bramalea, Ontario, Canada L6S IS8. Postcard Carnival is a live electroacoustic piece/event, a media barrage celebrating the wonder, joy and excitement of an amusement park. Postcard Carnivalwascreated for a retrospective concert of my works at the Music Gallery, Toronto, 22 February 1990. The score for Postcard Carnival consists of program/descriptive notes, narration and a CUE sheet. The 'performers ' include the narrator (sound/text composer, Richard Truhlar), two slide projectionists, a videocassette recorder operator, a grinder organist, a violinist, a pianist and a tape-cassette player. The first projector shows slides from postcards of amusement parks and the second projector shows aI?usement park photographs . Video footage of the parks is presented and the narrator (electronically processed) reads from a list of postcard texts. Dan Wilke, a friend and amusement park enthusiast from Buffalo, NY,introduced me to the wonderful sounds of his grinder organ, which he made from a kit, and to the rolls of music that he cut from a template. I incorporated these sounds into PostcardCarnival and created a separate piece called Interrupted Waltz, in which the grinder organ's part is a standalone piece. InterruptedWaltz continues my work with music based on interruptions. It consists of two ideas constantly interrupting each other: a carnival-type waltz and a more freely composed, 'noisier' part based on dissonant intervals and small clusters. The waltz reflects the nervousness and impatience of our lifetime, filled, as it is, with numerous interruptions. All parts of Postcard Carnival relate to amusement parks, my life-long hobby. The only exception is the solo violin. The violinist is instructed to play excerpts from familiar classical orchestral repertoire in a manner that strongly suggests 'practicing'. Ironically, the power and beauty of classical music propelled me into a career of music, yet now the performance of my own music competes with classical music. The violin's part is an homage to this strange dichotomy. DOPpLERDEN Steve Mann, McMaster University, Communications Research Laboratory , Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4Kl. One of my current works in the making, DopplerDen, is an interactive environment in which the speeds of light and sound are reduced in a virtual way. It embodies a sort of time warp, based on stretching physical realities, such as the tendency for a train whistle to sound higher in pitch or a light source to look more blue when approached at near the speed of sound or light. There are windows and various light sources in the room. When viewers walk toward one of these sources of light, the light turns bluish. When they walk away, it turns reddish . When they stand still, all the lights are their normal colors. If viewers walk north, the light sources (windows and lamps) on the north side of the room (in front ofviewers) turn bluish, and those on the south side (behind the viewer) turn reddish . Those to the viewers' left and right remain the same color. The effect is most dramatic when the viewer first enters the room. Walking down the corridor, the room is completely bathed in blue, and the sign above the door-"But SLOW, what light through yonder window breaks"-seems most appropriate to the mood. There is also a computer with a display that looks green when the viewer stands still, but the color changes as the viewer moves. The range of colors is similar to the lights, but the computer display always maintains a much more richly saturated color than that of the lights. When the viewer moves toward it, the screen color 'blue shifts', and the fan inside the computer speeds up, making a high-pitched sound. Even the highpitched ringing (horizontal oscillator sound), typical ofvideo displays, and the occasional error beep from the speaker vary markedly...