John Granzow

Assistant Professor
School of Music Theatre and Dance
University of Michigan
jgranzow [at] umich [dot] edu




VoxVoxel

From an IBM 720 line printer playing "Three Blind Mice" in 1954 to dot matrix printers playing love songs and Queen, mechanical noises coming from printers were slowly tamed, domesticated and controlled, and countless unproductive hours of programming time were spent in figuring out how to make those noises into musical notes, phrases and whole pieces for the enjoyment of the IT team.

From deafening antique mainframe line printers to whisper quiet inkjets, all have been at the spotlight of a concert performance (or at least a basement computer room). VoxVoxel is "composed" by designing a 3D shape and capturing the sound of the working 3D printer using transducers. Those sounds are amplified, modified and multiplied through live processing in a computer using ardour and LV2/LADSPA plugins, and output in full matching 3D sound. 3D pixels in space.

The piece is dedicated to our endangered wooden 3d printer, slowly declining with the rise of folded metal frames in entry-level machines. The wood, (if fragile) is good for contact vibrations, to amplify rhythms of the tool-path and the frequencies of stepper motors. This rare 3d printer takes six minutes to warm up its extruder. For this, it has also fabricated an array of extensions for its equally endangered human performer. Today we can not only use our computers to 2D print beautifully typeset musical scores[*], but we can also 3D print entire acoustical instruments out of plastic droplets. But the object that is 3D printed does not necessarily need to serve a physical purpose.