Tour details are here
https://www.peterpichler-trautonium.com/english/australia-tour/
Sadly Peter isn't coming to Sydney.
The tour only covered Perth, Melbourne & Canberra.
(Thanks to Andrew of NLC for telling me about the gig in Perth.)
Peter Pichler's Mixtur-trautonium. Foto courtesy by Edward Beierle
Edward Beierle [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
Anyway, I'm going to the Canberra gig to see the Alfred Hitchcock classic "The Birds" to a score using the Trautonium. This is a live performance performed by Peter Pichler....................... quite fitting as a Mixtur- Trautonium was used to make bird noises in this classic film of Hitchcock
The Trautonium is one of the earliest electronic instruments.
Telefunken Volkstrautonium, 1933
It was invented in Berlin, Germany by Friedrich Trautwein in the 1930s. This early version was a commercial failure, though I understand modern ones are still being produced in various forms today.
(Doepfer & Trautoniks).
There is no keyboard. Instead Trautoniums use a resistor wire over a metal plate. The above Trautonium is one of the earliest. Probably less than 200 were made. Enhancements made by Oskar Sala in the fifties. He added a second string/metal plate interface, noise and envelope generators, bandpass filters, and subharmonic oscillators.This led to the well known Mixtur-Trautonium.
"The sounds were at first produced by neon-tube relaxation oscillators (later, thyratrons, then transistors), which produced sawtooth-like waveforms. The pitch was determined by the amount of resistive wire chosen by the performer (allowing vibrato, quarter-tones, and portamento). The oscillator output was fed into two parallel resonant filter circuits. A foot-pedal controlled the volume ratio of the output of the two filters, which was sent to an amplifier.
Doepfer produce a few Eurorack modules which provide Trautonium possibilities.
The Doepfer A-113
The subharmonic in this module is a sawtooth wave (German: Kippschwinger) and not a sine.
The master frequency comes from an external oscillator. The external VCO is patched into the frequency input of the A-113. Rectangle or square waveforms are commonly used. Rectangle outputs are converted to sawtooth waveforms. Sawtooth waveforms are rich in harmonics.
The frequency dividers of the 4 sub-harmonics are adjusted with up/down buttons as displayed with 2 character LED displays.
The sub-harmonics are available as single outputs and as mix output with adjustable levels for the sub-harmonics. The four sub-harmonics generated by the A-113 contain strong harmonic spectra with even and odd harmonics. They represent ideal basic sound sources to be modified with separate sound processing modules
Formant Filters create sounds similar to human vocal sounds.
The 104 is a replica of the lowpass/bandpass arrangement of the Mixtur Trautonium
There is no voltage control so you'll have to do lots of manual knob twiddling.
You could possibly substitute the 104 with four separate 12 dB multimode filters and a 4 input mixer.
The filters must be BandPass at the very least.
Probably a good combo would be low pass & band pass & off.
Each filter picks up and amplifies a set of small frequency bands.
The signal is fed into each filter in parallel and then into the mixer.
Here is a link to an excellent video by Ghost Monkey of a Eurorack version of the Trautonium
Formant filter https://youtu.be/_8krvAdIcIQ
Links
+ Doepfer
+Wikipedia
+ Birds Live score
+ Trautoniks
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