Carambol

Karlheinz Essl first electronic composition, realized 1985 at the Institute for Electro-Acoustic and Experimental Music at the Music University of Vienna. Its total duration is 8 minutes.

The piece is entirely based on the recording of two billard balls bouncing together. Filtering this basic material (a few centimeters of tape) with various settings of an ancient Brühl & Kjær one-third-octave-band-filter led to different variants of the billard ball click that were stored on magnetic tape.

With these few elements, the entire piece was composed by realizing a score that was composed beforehand only by using the technique of cutting and splicing of tiny pieces of magnetic tape.

Updated: 7 Feb 2010