Un-drum is a complex interaction between music composition, body movement, performance, and computer and electronic engineering. It is a series of intense physical sound performances that Tarek Atoui started in 2009.
For Un-drum 3: The Semantic Scanning Electron Microscope, Atoui has developed an audio library of tens of thousands of microsamples to explore semantics through a system analogous to a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Like a SEM, which magnifies things on a fine scale, the tools of Un-drum 3 allow live exploration of long audio tracks at a very small scale. Through a system of pressure sensors that engage the physical strength of the artist’s body, Atoui scans tracks at a high speed to instantly select and edit microsamples based on the Fast Fourier Transform analysis technique. FFT is a complex sound analysis protocol that determines the spectrum of a sound, its constituting frequencies, and their density according to the law of Fourier. Systems of infrared modules respond to Atoui’s movements.
