Saturday, December 2, 2006
Coming up next or never
Currently I’m building a little noisemaking device, basically following the Your First Synth schematics by Music from Outer Space.
I also odered some 555 and 556 timer circuits to toy around with and build the so called Atari Punk Console and similar things. Actually, I do not really need the finished devices, or rather, I don’t know yet what to use them for — like with Lego bricks, the creation is the more satisfying part of the game. That usage may appear spontaneously or not at all, but I like having strange artifacts laying around for visitors to play with. In case of the noisemaking device (I’ll post some pictures in the next days) I will give it away as a gift to a musician friend.
Still in the thought queue of things to make:
- An analogue tape echo/delay. The plan is to hack up four (identical) walkmen and a fifth tape player with a recording head, fix it all on some wooden board and have a tape loop running continuously. Electronics would include switches for the echo depth, basically switching the play heads on/off and a pot for motor speed, ie. echo delay time. Another simpler idea is to use an old double tape deck with one tape loop in two prepared cassette shells, so that audio is continously recorded on deck 1 and played back with a delay by deck 2.
- I recently bought another b/w TV on ebay, a 70s model in an orange plastic case. I want to fit one of the above noise maker circuits inside and feed the output into the deflection coils like in the Wave Vessel/Wobblevision. The sound must not necessarily be heard, so it would be some kind of piece of digital interactive art: A TV with several unlabeled knobs and switches that shows a strange picture you can alter using these controls.
- Another idea from today involves an old 70s turntable, also in an orange plastic shell turned into a new instrument. Besides a speed controller for the motor (to play records at unusually low or high speeds), I would add a small noise circuit like the aforementioned APC and one or two small sampling circuits. These are found in cheap “memo” devices that can record several seconds of audio in low quality. I tinkered with a free giveaway memo keychain once and produced nice aliasing effects by changing the resistor on the small board, enabling ultra-low sampling and playback rates. So the turntable would feature two of these memo circuits to sample audio snippets from the record and to play them back once or continuously. Add some controls to mix the various sound sources and you have a strange sonic artifact.
