Chladni Quartet & Valtteri Alanen: Free Music for Four Chladni Plates, a Human and a Synthesizer~P.M

Name: Chladni Quartet & Valtteri Alanen: Free Music for Four Chladni Plates, a Human and a Synthesizer~P.M
Start: 2025-09-06T19:30:00+02:00
Location: Krásova 27, Praha

Schedule

Sat, 06 Sep, 2025 at 07:30 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Krásova 27, Praha | Prague, PR

~Punctum Microresidencies present~
Chladni Quartet is a new electroacoustic instrument currently in development. It draws geometric forms in the sand while playing music in chaotic interaction with a musician. Valtteri Alanen, an experimental musician and the instruments designer will present a semi-improvised concert at Punctum, releasing the full potential of this work in progress to distill the present moment as sound and image.Raw vibrations, resonances of matter, the meditative sedimentality of traveling sand. A musician, playing their instrument only to the extent that the instrument plays them. The instrument is only a prototype but the music is always already made, as long as it is played.
The audience is welcome to stay after the concert to ask questions and talk with the artist about the instrument, its design, related ideas and/or life and art in general. Valtteri will also host an open workshop on working with Chladni plates, Lissajous figures and experimental material-visual-oriented composition on Sunday 7.9. following the concert.

Working group:
Idea, instrument design and -building, musician: Valtteri Alanen
Co-thinking, dramaturgy: Eglė Šimėnaitė
Co-thinking, composition: Robert Ruohola
Co-production:
Trial & Theatre Collective
Grus Grus Teatteri
With support from:
Tehdas Teatteri, Punctum Krasovka, Ehkä-Production, Aura of Puppets, Edea Design Oy

– – –

Valtteri Alanen is an object-theatre artist, sound-designer and an experimental musician. He works on uncovering the foundational puppetness of being. Not on how the human manipulates its environment, but how everything that is animates all the things that are. While formally educated in puppetry and object theatre at Turku Arts Academy and DAMU, Prague, he is also a learned-on-the-job sound engineer as well as a founding member of Trial & Theatre Collective, working and performing internationally.

Chladni Quartet is an electro-acoustic instrument/ensemble, a do-it-yourself application indebted to scientific instruments and a feedback-loop of sight, sound and action. The instrument itself is comprised of four purpose built chladni-plates, a four-voice modular synthesiser, fine sand, some microphones, a mixing desk and a musician-technician. Valtteri Alanen is conducting the R&D phase of building the instrument with the help of live-artist Eglė Šimėnaitė and composer Robert Ruohola. The concert and workshop at Punctum are a part of the development process of the instrument.
The Chladni Quartet is based on the chladni-plate, a scientific instrument developed in the 1800’s by Ernst Chladni. Initially it was used in then ground-breaking research on acoustics and physics, demonstrating for example the relationship between Lissajous-patterns and the vibration of sound. The instrument has in recent years had a small renaissance in the field of applied physics, where it is being utilised for example on the fields of micromanipulation, nanomechanics and self-assembly. Together with Trial & Theatre, Alanen has already implemented a chladni-plate in the Nano Steps performance series, acoustically manipulating microscopic particles in a puppet-theatre context. Chladni Quartet shifts the scale of action to the macro-world and naked human perception. It also tugs the context to the direction of experimental contemporary music, while not abandoning its roots in puppetry altogether.