Nick Didkovsky is a guitarist, composer, and computer music programmer. In 1983, he founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve. Doctor Nerve joins the furious energy of rock with intricate composition, some of which finds its origins in rich software systems of his own design. He presently resides in New York City, where he composes for Doctor Nerve and other ensembles — including the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet and the multimedia improvising trio Shadow Puppies (with Hans Tammen and Kurt Ralske) — programs music software, and teaches computer music composition at NYU.

Didkovsky’s work includes the very interesting piece Tube Mouth Bow String, recently played by Didkovsky and the Sirius String Quartet at the Sonic Circuits Festival in Washington, DC. A strange title? Here’s what its all about.

Some time ago, when he was on tour with the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Didkovsky got the idea of exploring multiple uses of talk boxes for a complete band. The talk box was used as a guitar gimmick; it works (in direct contact with the mouth) as a resonance chamber for the final sound effect, which comes via a tube that is connected with the effects pedal for the instruments that are being played. It is called talk box because when someone speaks, it seems as if the instrument is speaking. Didkovsky, however, preferred to use it as a direct (real-time) mouth-activated, audio-filter generator of sound. At first, he was thinking of a guitar-based group, but while talking to Ron Lawrence of Sirius String Quartet, they agreed it would sound more interesting in combination with a string quartet. The final effect is pure drone music, really intense in its thousands of hues and harmonically rich.

You can play with the circuit used to model Nick’s Tube Mouth Bow String here. Or listen to an excerpt from here: