For Real Toads: Laurie Anderson

Over at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, my friend Marian introduced us to Laurie Anderson, the only person I've heard of (in my limited experience) who was ever artist-in-residence at NASA. 

According to the timeline in Wikipedia, Laurie dated the late Lou Reed for 16 years and then was married to him from 2008 until his death in 2013. Married late and widowed all too soon.

 

Laurie and Lou in the year before he died

Laurie Anderson performing "Homeland" in Milan

It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You, It’s the Hole

think of all the horses

whose hair she saved

by inventing a

magnetic-tape

violin bow

and her turn-of-the-century

six-foot-long talking stick

MIDI controller*

a performance artist

and comic book artist

a children’s book artist

a spoken-word artist

and a singer

a musician

an innovator

and a Lou Reed-dater

she married him

and made his last years warm

*The Talking Stick is (an) instrument that (Laurie Anderson) designed in collaboration with a team from Interval Research and Bob Bielecki. It is a wireless instrument that can access and replicate any sound. It works on the principle of granular synthesis. This is the technique of breaking sound into tiny segments, called grains, and then playing them back in different ways. The computer rearranges the sound fragments into continuous strings or random clusters that are played back in overlapping sequences to create new textures. The grains are very short, a few hundredths of a second. Granular synthesis can sound smooth or choppy depending on the size of the grain and the rate at which they’re played. The grains are like film frames. If you slow them down enough, you begin to hear them separately.