The Final Blogtier

To be honest, I am not sure how to wrap up with my final blog. Do I discuss the skills I have learned? I could. My soldering is better as is my confidence in dealing with circuitry but such truths are trivial and do not make good reading of any kind. Do I talk about circuit bending? Been there, done that. Do I talk about homemade instruments? Same shit, different day. What's left? It's the end of the semester and I'm blown out physically and mentally. To borrow a phrase from Dylan, I'm tangled up in blue.
What is left? How about using MIDI to control telsa coils? Not exactly DIY stuff but I think that can be forgiven (it still falls into the electro-acoustic music after all). Bah, that is old hat too. You know maybe I have nothing left to say about DIY. May be I have things to ask instead. This question is open to anyone. This DIY stuff is entertaining on its own and to be a part of but I have to wonder and ask - do you think you will continue to tinker after this class is done? I surely hope to. In fact, I have a few projects in mind for summer. But this is not about me - I would like to hear if anyone else plans on using this stuff in the future.

Toy Tweaking

If youtube is any indication (no I'm not going to post a crappy video with this blog), toy tweaking seems to be a common interest among DIYers in this day and age. Personally, I do not get the fascination as much as others. Sure, toys squeak and squeal, they make hundreds of noises great and small yet in the end they are just noise making circuits. That is all and no different than a home built oscillator or contact mic or some other homemade way of making sound. I guess part of it is ease, why build the circuit when you can buy it made cheap, and part of it, I think, is we respect our own projects too much to bust them up. Part of it might be too the evil enjoyment of making something that is made to be entertaining to children (but annoying to adults) and tweaking it to make horrible noise.
All this is not to say that I do not enjoy circuit bending at all. In fact, one of my favorite things to do that I learned in this class is to bend a circuit using just my hands. There is something about taking a thing that is supposed to be artificially controlled and messing with it in such an organic way. No, I quite enjoy circuit bending. I just do not enjoy tweaking toys as some others. No specific reason. I enjoy doing it as much as tweaking other circuits and may be that is it. I do not see it different than any other circuit while others may put some value to it.

Some people are too good for their own good.

With the last couple of blogs so focused on circuit bending, art installations, and electronic projects I thought I would explore the other side of what DIY audio means for a little bit. That is things that do not plug in or require power or circuitry to work. Apparently, these kinds of instruments are big in the folk scene which I did not know before. It makes sense as folk traditions have often been linked to lower socioeconomic statuses than the rich and homemade instruments must have been commonplace in desolate economic times in the past such as the depression.

This guy has a few acoustic DIY projects that caught my interest. Honestly, the propane tank drum nor the upright washtub-esqe bass are all that interesting (they are common enough projects) but that third instrument caught my eye. A hand cranked fiddle is truly a bizarre wonder and I still am trying to wrap my mind around it. Unfortunately, no plans are listed in the video comments and no discussion on these instruments are made but I will see with a little google fu you can find this information.

PVC pipe drums are nothing new. Hell, the Blue Man Group made a career out of using them. Yet, they seem to be a common instrument among DIYers. I guess, short of trashcans, there is no quicker and easy way to cobble together some drums. And PVC at least allows for variable pitch from some analogy non-circuit bending.

Dr. Twombly Is Going To Hate This Blog (Progressive rock ahead)

I am guessing that blogging about progressive rock in a DIY audio class is going to seem like trying to pick up a hooker outside of Saint Paul's Cathedral to some. This can only be sacrilege of the highest order - worthy of the death penalty or a really nasty stomach flu. Yes, I am bound to make at least one enemy today (Please don't fail me) but as bizarre as it seems circuit bending as a long and strong tradition in the progressive rock world.
The first Moogs were rolling out just about the time progressive bands started to hit it big. Progressive rock bands were known for their musical experimentation and it seemed every would be Wakeman or Emerson got his greedy hands on a Moog as fast as possible. What they failed to see however is that the Moog is not played - it is defeated in mortal combat. The true virtuosos were forced to create their own sounds through complex networks of cables that crossed, shorted out, or elongated the various audio ports on the front. When that no longer survived to create the sound the musician often went to the back of the instrument itself and with a licked finger or a tight grip bent, broke and modified circuits by any means necessary. After all, all was slave to the song. There are a few great videos listed below and, for the sake of the sanity of some, I have listed the time the circuit bending begins to save viewing time.

Keith Emerson playing a Moog with an insane amount of cables patched in it. Watch as he modifies the sound on the fly by changing the network of the cables. (1:40)

Keith Emerson (again) directly messing with the circuits on the back of his synth. (6:05)

From The Desk of the Projects Beyond Me Editor

First Project
I really dig this project due to a couple of reasons. First, being able to interact with any project brings greater understand and joy to some who have troubles connecting to art otherwise. Second, the combination of multiple sense (in this case sound, touch, and sight) can really add some depth to the observers experience with a piece. As such, this is a great multimedia project and one definitely rooted in the DIY mentality (I couldn't find a schematic for this anywhere). The downside is while the guy showcases what his project can do - he never reveals how it was made or how it does it. It's still interesting to watch and listen to but the inquisitive side of me will not shut up about learning how it works.
Second Project
This is another interactive installation. Unlike the previous one which required modifying the resistance of water to produce sound, this project, instead, has individuals use a glove with tape reader built in. People run their gloved hand over a wide surface of tape material and they then produce sound from their hand reading the information of the tape. This project seems less connect to DIY than the other one but it reminded me a project listed in our texts as the tape violin. The tape violin works on similar principles as the tape is strung on a bow and the tape is then dragged over a tape head to produce the audio.

You Science the console for 75 experience. Your Science skill has increased!

Before my meanderings in the music department as a non-music major and before my inevitable fall to a major in the arts, I started life as a baby physics major. I wish I could claim that I left early but I ended up wasting three years of my life (and nearly sixty credits) in pursuit of a physics degree that would not be (they canceled the astrophysics major here the year I tried to apply to it anyways). Yet, I still find use for the math and science classes on occasion and . . . well . . . I thought I might use this blog to explore one thing I have heard conversed about in class. That is the formation of a square wave from the more normal sine waves we have been working with.
Now when modifying the tone of a sinusoid, we end up changing the wave itself. This is not some great revelation as any high school graduate could tell you a change in pitch is a change in frequency. Yet, to modulate a sine wave into a square one requires instead a modulation in amplitude not frequency. Here is another handy video (I post a lot of these) showing what I mean by using a Fourier transformation to create the wave from the normal sine. As the video progresses, you will see that the period (the section of the wave that does not repeat or the "beginning" to the "end") of the wave does not change but instead the amplitude (that is the peak (top) and trough(bottom) of the wave) changes. It becomes more ripple-y. These ripples increase in fluctuation as the signal advances to represent a more square or flat line. As the wave approaches infinity, the squareness of the wave approaches perfection. Neat stuff, huh?

PS - I hope I made this easy to understand so any fault in understanding is a fault in my explanation.
PPS - I hope people check out the other video on Fourier Transformations. It's really well done.
PPPS - I hope Dr. Twombly or some other kind soul might fix any errors in this post if they should arise.

Cage Match: Oscillator vs Guitar

We have done a lot of breadboarding of oscillators in this class. We started easy with the simplistic one oscillator schematic working our way through having oscillators that modulate oscillators and well beyond those projects. Creating oscillators that produce sound as certainly, I think, has been one of the most popular projects for us to explore and play with this semester. There is something attractive in torturing those poor circuits into scream their little electronic lungs out and there is been more than once that we have heard someone make some bizarre growl or screeching cry come from their breadboard and we have smirked, and asked the offender how they did it.
Yet, one thing we have had little experience of, until late in the semester, was feeding audio input into an oscillator. I would say it is fair to venture that this is the forum, in which, people are most used to dealing with oscillators. They are not used to create the sound themselves but instead used to modify it in some way, shape, or form. For me at least, as cool as it to get this oscillators to twitch their own sound, I am more driven by how oscillators tweak the sound of an instrument (especially a homemade one). So when I stumbled upon this video - I could not help but want to share it on the blog. The sound this guy gets out of his guitar is amazing but it is the sound at the end that really had me impressed and jealous.

John Cage and the Question

This may not seem to be a blog post that is very related to what we are doing in DIY but I would disagree. First, it is slightly about John Cage, a composer not only mentioned in our text but one also respected among electro-acoustic composers and musicians. The second reason I would disagree with this opinion is that from this story there is a viewpoint or opinion that I think must be addressed and I am curious as to how others in this class might respond.
A friend of the family once told a story about his father had seen Cage perform in the 1960s. His father, he said, had attended the concert almost by accident; as he merely looked to find a show to bring a date to and a friend of his had offered his tickets to the concert. Without further thought, his father attended the show with his date and, needless to say, they were more than a bit a confused by the event. As they left, before his father could ask a question of the woman, she turned to him and said, "I think you are too weird for me and I think I am going home now." And she left. Simple as that. This friend's father was apt to remark then that Cage was forever "too weird" for any "normal people".
Who knows if the story is true (I would like to think it is) but the question is then is that true? Does Cage (or electro-acoustic music in general) appeal to only a certain aesthetic and does it alienate a more general audience? I like to think art tends to speak to something universally human but I do not have answers to these questions; and, therefore, I would like to hear anyone else's thoughts on the subject.

The Diddley Bow

One of the projects I looked forward to the most in this class was the construction of our homemade guitars (or diddley bows as they are sometimes known). Part of it is I have a fascination with homemade instruments (the project listed as tape head violin has my interest as a possible summer project) and part of it probably lies in a deeper and dirty shadow of my subconscious that I care not to explore or reveal.
Yet, I would also lay blame at one group in particular - blues musicians. The blues has always been a music at root in the folk traditions of African Americans. In the later 19th and early 20th centuries, African Americans suffered from institutionalized racism and, as such, oppression occurred not only socially but also economically. African American blues musicians of the early 20th century often created their music with homemade instruments. This tradition greatly affected the development of rock and roll as the homemade instrumental music of early blues musicians later influenced British skiffle bands which in turn gave rise to British invasion bands such as the Beatles, the Stones, etc.
With all the history, how could I not be interested? On top of that the summer this academic year before I discovered an artist called Seasick Steve. He has created and performed songs with his custom built diddley bow and that is where and why the instrument captured my attention the most. Below is a link to Seasick Steve playing a song titled "Save Me" on his custom diddley bow (perhaps custom is a bit redundant now that I look at it). For all its flaws, one has to respect the honesty of such music.

Seasick Steve - Save Me

DIY Audio - The Beginning

To be honest, when I first entered this course, I had no idea what DIY Audio might entail. My only experiences with audio equipment were those as a consumer. I have dealt with audio equipment as a stage performer (as I am sure nearly everyone who will read this has) and faulty amps, cabs, and mics were the bane of my existence (as I am sure nearly everyone who will read this will agree).

As such, I have grown cautious in my dealings with the Electronic Audio Gods. Sacrifices, while abhorrent as they are, are necessary and you take the Gods' smiling benevolence when you can and weather, best you can, the droughts of happiness when they come. Messing with equipment, beyond the mildest affair of using prebuilt equipment to mess with the output of prebuilt equipment, seemed sacrilege.

But I think any artist might agree that from great sacrilege arises great art. I will not make any such claim to my own meadanderings and tinkerings nor am I anymore even in any way performer of music any more. I will state, however, that this class as at least shown me the hint of possibilities in available in the DIY scene. If I were a composer, I could see myself working with this kind of instrumentation and music; but then again I'm attracted to the new.

My Beloved Casio

I've been wire bending my casio sk-1 ever since I got for !THREE DOLLARS! at the thread shed (a consignment store) in my hometown about 3 years ago. The thing is a beast. Even without breaking it open you can sample, do simple synthesis, and midi sequence with the little plastic thing. Once you do break it open its just a god damn gold mine. Touching the thing wont give you much more then an electrical buzz but once your do some carefull connecting you an aligator clip or some leads you can really get some good sounds. From messing around with it a little over the years and especially in class I've learned alot about it. The best way to manipulate the sounds or drum beats that it can produce is to mess with the big chips (larger versions of the ones we use in class) located all the way to the right. When you connect the very first one to any of the others it changes the sound or beat in an extremely managable way. Often it won't throw it out of pitch or time signature with only one connection. This multiplies the kind of sounds you can make on the thing by about a million. Just last night I only used one alligator clip connection to make a synth that had two pitches that played in a rhythm everytime I played a key. Pressing another key would produce another two tones in the same rhythm. The best thing was that you could play a certain sequence of keys to actually make a traditional melody that was made more complicated by the switching pitches. I added this over some simple hip hop drums to make a pretty dirty and slightly sick sounding beat. This is one of the best things about the casio, you can definently get the thing to scream noise, but you can also manage it well to keep things more traditionaly musical. As far as chaos goes you can connect one of the headphone output circuts into a circut comming from the key's that will make everything distort and fall out of pitch and time. This is beautiful, you can press the keys and they won't listen at all but rather will play random screaming noises. You play drum beats while this connection is on and the individual drum sounds will play at completely random times and as you add more connections on the chips as before more and more unique sounds will find their way into the drum pattern. Lastly you can minipulate the speed of this pattern by simply turning screw controllers on the keyboard's clocks. It has one for both large speed/pitch adjustment and small tweaking.

Electric Mic

The second or third week of class we created a cheap and portable electric microphone. It wasn't too hard to construct, and it consisted of a single electric mic that can be purchased online from radioshack or other sources. If I remember correctly the price was about 5 dollars which is suuuuuuuper cheap for a mic. I have a couple low end professional ones and they both cost 80 dollars a piece. Anyway to make this thing run all we had to do was wire it to a 9 volt battery and do some power manipulating with a resistor and a capacitor. This kept the power running into the mic at a level that made it work correctly. We then wired the output into a 1/8 inch jack to plug it into our portable amps. I've been wondering what happens when you run power incorrectly into it but apparently the outcome is bad. Not good bad either, which is a dissapointment. I've had alot of ideas about how to use these mics. Mostly, I want to make alot of them, maybe around ten, and mic up an entire room. You could put one on each wall, and a few on the ceiling and floor. It would be good to have one in each corner of the room as well so maybe more then ten would be even better. You would probablly have to set the gain pretty low on each mic to reduce noise, but you may be able to get a very very satisfying hiss comming from all of them as well. You would have to use long wire on the outputs but you could run them all into a small mixer to tweak the levels. Then you could run output of this small mixer into a larger mixer, into a mono or stereo channel. From there the limits are endless. You could record guitars, vocals, drums or whatever and pick up the sound of all around the room. The room's little vibrations and its acoustics would also get picked up. Personally I would use it to try to get a really really huge guitar sound, or just to spice up rock recordings with a better room sound. It would also be super benificial to vocal recording, Instead of holding a mic like I usualy have to in my makeshift studio without a mic stand I could simply wear my headphones and sing from whatever part of the room I felt sounded the best. I could even move around in the mic-field and probablly get a weird effect out of it. As far as drums go I think they would sound extremely Lo-Fi but beautiful, If you could fiddle with the eq to get the bass and snare to stick out just right I think you could get some great crap sounding drums. Like poorly recorded punk drumming, or maybe an ancient 40's sounding trap set sound. The best thing about this idea is that is do able for cheap, I already have to mixers and all I need now are enough little electric mics, 9 volt batteries, and compacitors + resistors.

electric mike

I thought we were building a cheap condenser mike but it was in fact an electric mike. We had few resistors and capacitors , few input plugs and mike recording head bought and with few connections with additional battery power we built an electric mike. I doubt we even spent $ 5 for that mike , even less however that was the cheapest but big thing to be building by your self.

I am planning to have more such mikes built however the quality of recording seemed to be little effected by hiss sound. however with few adjustment I think I can build a good mike indeed

Contact mikes

This mike is one of the easiest to built. For every ones surprise it was a speaker part in the begenning when it was connected to the amplifier as an input source, It turned out to be a well usuable contact mike. I tried to record normal precussive sounds and It did record good but what intriged me was it was very good cheap source of under water miking. Just try recording the contact mike under the water, It will give you whole new dimension of sound.

What I think DIY Class would make me able to do

I had not thought of any appropriate use of taking this class until I actually got introduced to the stuffs we do here...I still have a lot of questions of what I will be able to get out of this class by this semester
I got to be introduced to the electrical configurations of the things what I have always used and never wondered how it works. Now besides knowing how the electric stuffs like Microphones and speakers works, I get to build it from the scratch. Of course parts of it should be bought from elsewhere. I get to make weird and cool sound out of those things. I am hoping to have a lot of information gathered to make some cool stuffs of my own.