Notes Unfolding
Notes Unfolding
#43 - Shruti Box Experiment
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#43 - Shruti Box Experiment

Water, piano, drone, ambience

Hi from Trivandrum, India where we’re in our final two days in this country before finally making our way back west.

Johana got me a new instrument for my birthday a few weeks ago and I’m excited to share its sound with you here. A shruti box is a drone instrument. It’s played by pumping a box open and closed after selecting which notes you want the pumped air to play. The note selection is done by opening or closing small covers over holes on one side of the box. The player doesn’t often alter the note settings while playing, so the same notes are usually maintained throughout the playing. (In today’s recording I make occasional changes to the chord being played.)

Me with my new shruti box.

The shruti box has a bellows and reeds like an accordion and a comparable sound as well. A related south Asian instrument is the harmonium, but unlike accordions and harmoniums, the shruti box does not have a keyboard as it is intended to be used for its drone sound. In some traditions it is mainly used for tuning purposes or for vocal training and practice but in the south of India it is used in live performance as well, and the instrument has now spread to other parts of the world.

I recorded about four minutes of myself playing the shruti box, then two versions of piano over this (one an acoustic piano sound, the other electric). I included mostly the acoustic piano in the final recording, and just a few snippets of the EP here and there. Finally, I dug into a folder of various nature recordings I’ve made over the past year or so and decided to include a twenty second clip of a small stream (looped throughout).

Hope you enjoy it.

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