String Quartet II

String quartet II refers to a piece I did 1988 called ”Stråkkvartett” (String quartet). At that point of time sampling was a very new thing and was about to change the world of electronic music. I decided to se what I could do with this new technology to create a piece from the instrumental tradition but with a new twist. Since the mid 1990 when Yamaha released the first physical modeling synth the idea of mimicking acoustic instruments using only mathematical calculations has been on the road map for a while. However the results since then have been less than impressive. Until now… I recently came across a physical modeling synth by Swedish company Reason called ”Friction” which impressed me. Since physical modeling allows for not only creating realistic impressions of acoustic instruments it also allows for various ways of changing the behavior of the acoustic properties. I felt this as an opportunity to once more explore a new way of using the ”classical” form of the string quartet in the weird and wonderful world of digital magic. The last 10 seconds of the piece uses the last 10 seconds of the first string quartet.