James Gill
Dan Grabois shows off the pitch-bending capabilites of a Moog synthesizer, which links up with the electronic wind instrument (EWI) he’s holding in his lap.
Inside the confounding, windowless labyrinth of UW-Madison’s Mosse Humanities Building, horn professor Dan Grabois is busy setting up his classroom for the new school year. The walls are freshly painted, there’s new carpet on the floors and in a tangle of boxes surrounding him, there’s more than $160,000 in electronic music equipment waiting to be unpacked.
“There should be a theremin here, but it was the only thing that got damaged in the shipment,” Grabois says, referring to a bizarre Soviet-era instrument played by moving hands between two antennas. “Things have been coming in and I’ve been storing them up in my office. It started getting pretty outrageous, just piling up like mad.”
Grabois isn’t complaining. In fact, he’s practically giddy about the task at hand: creating the Electro-Acoustic Research Space, or EARS for short. The school’s first major investment in electronic music education, production and performance, the laboratory funded by an equipment grant from the UW2020 initiative, which is part of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Since launching in 2015, UW2020 has funded more than 50 research projects, most related to the sciences. EARS was the first music-related initiative to be selected.
In applying for the grant, Grabois drafted a list of “anything and everything” a musician might want to outfit a state-of-the-art electronic music lab, consulting with colleagues at schools with similar programs. “It was a dream list, sky’s the limit,” he says. Using online retailers to estimate cost, the total came to $161,121. He applied for — and received — that exact amount. “It was perfect,” he says. “In the music world, usually you get half what you ask for.”
The “nerve center” of the lab is a desktop computer with a massive 27-inch display, the biggest Apple makes. Equipped with software like Ableton Live (a favorite of DJs and electronic composers) and Pro Tools (an industry-standard recording and production program), the computer can link up to everything in the lab. “We have tons of machines that affect the sound, which means we have incredible power to change the sounds of instruments,” Grabois says.
There’s an entire library of microphones, some for recording and some for amplification. “Mics and speakers ate up close to half our budget,” Grabois says, opening a polished wooden case to reveal a heavy silver microphone. On another table, there’s an array of colorful effects pedals, many handmade and hand-painted. Beyond the usual wah-wahs and fuzzboxes, there are some truly unusual units on display, including a sitar emulator and a polyphonic octave generator. “Some of these do things that I don’t even know,” Grabois says. “I’ll have to plug in and figure it out.”
To demonstrate the setup’s capability Grabois picks up an EWI — an electronic wind instrument that looks like a video game controller with a mouthpiece. He runs it through a Moog synthesizer (“This is where it all began,” he says of the iconic brand), manipulating the sound as he plays through an eight-octave range. As the pitch bends, it sounds at first like a dial-up modem and then like a futuristic pipe organ, blasting crystal-clear from four Bose tower speakers.
In an era when arts funding is scarce, Grabois believes that EARS will become known as “a jewel of the Midwest” and hopes that its presence at the university will spark new interest in electronic music from both faculty and students. He also plans to engage the community through open houses and masterclasses. But above all, the project is an experiment — much like the music that will be created in the lab. “We’re not trying to plan out what happens in here,” he says. “We’re saying, ‘This is a library, come learn.’”
EARS grand opening: Friday, Sept 15, 7:30 p.m. Room 2401, Humanities
Weirdest instrument: Reactable, which uses tabletop tangible user interface
Most obscure instrument: Ondes martenot, invented in 1928 and popularized by Radiohead
First EARS open house: Saturday, Nov. 4 at 4 p.m.
