- Developer: Soniccouture
- Version: 2.5
- File Size: 2.9 GB
- Requirements: Kontakt v6.7.1 or later
Glass Works is a set of Kontakt instruments which collects together 3 rare musical instruments which use glass to generate sound:
Le Cristal Baschet, The Glass Armonica, and a set of Cloud Chamber Bowls.
We travelled to Paris to record with Thomas Bloch, a virtuoso musician who specialises in rare instruments, and Glass Works is the result.. cinematic, creepy and cool.
Glass Armonica
The glass armonica, also known as the glass harmonica, bowl organ, hydrocrystalophone, or simply the armonica (derived from “harmonia”, the Greek word for harmony), is a type of musical instrument that uses a series of glass bowls or goblets graduated in size to produce musical tones by means of friction – rubbing a wet finger along the edge of the glass, as one might with a wine glass.
Cristal Baschet
The Cristal Baschet or ‘Le Cristal’ was designed in 1952 by Bernard and François Baschet. It consists of about 4 octaves of chromatically tuned glass rods, which are rubbed with wet fingers. The vibration of the glass is passed to a heavy block of metal, which itself is tuned and in fact determines the final pitch. The entire mechanism is amplified by a large steel plate called the “flame”. There are also three small fiberglass cones that amplify the higher frequencies.
Cloud Chamber Bowls (Bowed)
The Cloud Chamber Bowls are Soniccoutures recreation of an instrument built in the 1950s by maverick American composer Harry Partch. It consists of hanging “bowls” which are sections of 12-gallon glass carboys. Both tops and bottoms of the carboys are used. Partch had 14 (later 13) bowls hanging from a large wooden frame he called a “tori”. The name “Cloud Chamber Bowls” arose from the fact that Partch found the original tops and bottoms at a Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley in 1950. The bowls were originally used for cloud chambers used in tracing paths of subatomic particles.