Documentary

Here's the first half of our submission, a short documentary of the project, detailing the techniques used to hack our instruments and the regular practice sessions in which we composed the music for the performance below. Again, make sure to watch in HD!

Clive

The Performance

This is the second half of the submitted documentary, showing our performance. Make sure you watch it in HD! For a larger screen size, watch in on YouTube.


-Jordan

The Nintendo

Computer-controlled interactive, reactive graphics...

2nd_practice.m4v

It's our second practice in Russolo Room today! We made great sounds by Clive and Jordan. Bad news is David's guitar still got something wrong.

1st Practice.m4v

The first time we practice together, and have had lots of ideas about the performance. In the end, my Guitar have got some problems. I hope i can fix it at this weekend

Last of the new videos...

Final video for tonight! For the submission, I re-edited one of the earlier videos, adding in a few notes on what's going on; so here's a slightly better version of my first attempt at circuit-bending:

Clive's Walkman

Second one of my toys, a Sony Walkman:

Clive's Toy Duck

Was away at the weekend, got back and realised I still had videos to upload, so here's the first for tonight:

David's Toy Guitar

Final clip for tonight is a quick look at David's guitar. My camera work is particularly appalling on this one:

Jordan's Toy Phone

Second clip in quick succession; Jordan showing us his toy phone:

Jordan's Keyboard, version 2!

Here's the first of some short clips showing off our completed toys; Jordan talking us through his Yamaha keyboard:

First group videos!

Few weeks without a post, but we have been busy preparing for the first submission!
We now have a couple of successfully hacked toys/instruments each, and met on monday for an improvisation session to hear what eachother's toys can do and how they can work together musically. We took some iPhone videos of some of the toys which are currently taking hours to upload to YouTube; I'll post seperate new updates for each video once they finally upload!

We were quite surprised upon hearing what each of our hacked bits of gear could do not only how crazy some of the sounds generated by very simple hacks can be, but also how well our individual toys/instruments complimented each other. It was great to finally get together and try and use our odd bits of gear to make some music and we were all pretty excited by the results that we got:



Jordan and David set up the Cannon XL2 camera to capture the video, and I plugged all the toys straight into my Fireface to get a high quality, multi-channel recording in Cubase. Featured in the video are David's toy guitar and crazy toy apple at the back, Jordan's Yamaha keyboard and toy phone and my Sony Walkman (which died just a couple of minutes in due to some poor soldering!) and toy duck. Although this was only our first group improvisation, parts of the recording work really well; we definitely have a good foundation to build on musically and it's reasurring to find out that our initial attempts at circuit-bending were worth the effort. Although there's still a long way to go, I think we are off to a good start!

Jordan's Keyboard

Finally figured out how to edit videos from my iPhone and upload them to YouTube.

This was my first proper attempt at hacking a circuit, from a smiley faced toy that Brad and Eleni brought to our first group meeting. In the first half of the video, I'm using some crocodile clips and my fingers to find different points in the circuit that make interesting noises. Most are affecting playback of the toy's tune: sppeding up/slowing down the playback speed, pausing/cutting playback or jumping back to the start.

I then attempted to solder a couple of wires and a switch across a couple of points on the circuit board. However, it became obvious very quickly that the tip on my soldering iron is far too big for this sort of circuit; the solder points were either too small or just would not take the solder properly and a couple of the tiny resistors disintegrated!

This could have been the end of Mr Smiley Face, yet it actually made things even better! One of the ex-resistors from the circuit was controlling the playback speed of the tune; with that resistor gone, simply touching that part of the circuit makes things go crazy, never returning back to the correct speed. I'm thinking about trying to solder a variable resistor of some sort in place - perhaps a potentiometer or a light dependant resistor, or perhaps some body-contacts to keep the fun of just touching the circuit!

New Toys...

I was visiting my parents over the weekend, largely to scavenge my room for old gear/electronic gadgets/toys that I could rip apart and hack! I've now got my old Zoom drum machine, Korg 4-track digital recorder/guitar processor, sony walkman, aiwa minidisc player/recorder, alarm clock (Goku, from Dragon Ball...), talking Pikachu, slightly broken CD player (skips randomly) and a very broken guitar pedal that I thought I'd strip for parts.

Some of the circuits, like Pikachu's above, are pretty simple: just an on button that scrolls through three different sounds.

Other circuits, like the one above from the Korg 4-track, are quite impossible to figure out! I'm a little worried that poking about at random will result in a dead piece of gear...

I'm particularly keen to play about with the minidisc recorder - it'd be fun to be able to sample other toys/gadgets and then screw about with the playback! However, the built in rechargeable battery is completely dead, refusing to recharge at all and hard to find a replacement for; the case's screws are also reluctant to budge, so I can't open it up at the moment. Hopefully, I'll be able to get it working...

Possible Group Name + new toy...

As previously discussed, we want a name for our group/band. While I was reading the article 'Composers Inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor' by Nicolas Collins I was hit by a bout of inspiration when he was describing "a handful of emerging electronic artists,who banded around Tudor to form a loosely collective ensemble called Composers Inside Electronics"...


The term 'collective' would be a fitting one to use for us, because not only are we a collective, but our project focusses highly on the collection of discarded electronic devices and kids toys. Circuit Bending is a very 'collection'-based hobby... trawling ebay for vintage keyboards, trawling charity shops for interesting sound devices. 


So I tried a few names with 'collective' in them, and came up with...

THE BENDS COLLECTIVE

Not only is this a reference to the bends we perform on our instruments, but because our finished products sounds like they've got The Bends: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_sickness

Plus it's a nice merging of the Radiohead album and Animal Collective... two of my absolute favourite bands!

It sounds ugly at first, but say it over a few times and let it grow on you. It's just a suggestion so feel free to discard it and think of others. It would be good to have a name for the submission though... even if we change it at a later date.

Casio VL Tone

In other news, here's a couple of pictures of my new toy, it's a Casio VL Tone, my friend has had it kicking around his studio for years. It's a nifty little thing, it's got some interesting drum beats plus a tiny ADSR section where you can modularly create a custom synth sound by entering an 8 digit number. Each number represents a different element of the sound, e.g. Attack Time, Decay Time, Vibrato, Wave... This is a very neat system and so simple. The sounds are awesome too, so simple and child-like!

   

You can also record your own melodies and have it play them back quantised with the drums... Amazing! I can't wait to get hacking it. As soon as my new supplies are delivered I'll be delving into this one...

Casio VL Tone opened up

Jordan

REACTIVE GRAPHICS

JITTER

Today we had a lecture on Jitter, the visual side to Max/MSP. It was the first time I'd seen it in action and got very excited at the possibilities of using it in our project! There are several different ways we could use it... 

• We could have pre-made video affected in real time by Jitter who's parameters are being controlled either by us, or, more interestingly, by modified instruments/toys via an arduino.
• The parameters could be adjusted by audio input - so the music we are playing will affect the visuals. We could make certain things happen when the volume is high or low, or when frequencies change. Loads of options!
• We could take live footage of the audience/surroundings and have this affected in real time, again with the parameters controlled by us, or by hacked toys.

There are many more possibilities, these are just a few ideas. I'll try get a demo of some basic jitter skills posted in the next week as i learn how to use it. 

NINTENDO!!

My cousin dug out his old nintendo (nes) which I believe is very hackable. I will be able to get it from him in a week or so and get mucking around with it. This could provide a great source for visuals while we are playing. I love the idea of combining this with Jitter somehow... so Jitter is effecting the live feed from the NES. Again, it would be great to have to parameters controlled by something else which is going on i.e. REACTIVELY.

This may be an interesting section to use with the arduino... so we could have a program written on Max which is controlling the 'hacks' on the NES, that way we don't have to be constantly turning knobs and flicking switches. ALSO we could have hacked toys whose output can adjust parameters on Jitter which is effecting the live feed from the NES. Sorry if that sounds complicated... I'll find a better way to explain it. Hope this isn't being over-ambitious; I really want some stunning visuals which are REACTING to the performance!

MORE PICS + VIDS

For the final submission in April I think it would be really good to have a structured documentary taking us through the project from humble beginnings to (hopefully) an electrifying end! It would be good to make this as professional as possible, with a detailed narrative and fluent progression... as opposed to a collection of little videos we've made over the course of the project. Of course we can still include these little videos (of which im sure there'll be many) but we could have a voice narrating over the top / on-screen text to help explain what's going on. This would be a really good way to present our progression, and the documentary to climax with a high-quality video of our final performance. As Eleni suggested, putting this on a DVD with a menu would make it even better.

So, with this in mind, let's make any videos we do from now on as informative and semi-professional as possible. Also, we should look into sourcing a good camera (or cameras) for the final performance.

Thought i'd throw in a picture of a toy I opened up, and also 2 videos Clive and I made. I've found that this blog won't ever finish uploading a video from my machine, so I'm having to upload them to YouTube, which takes forever. Plus it adds massive black bars down each side. I'll have to start compressing the files... more stuff to research!

Mr Smile

• UPDATE: SILLY BLOG WOULDN'T LET ME UPLOAD THE VIDS FROM MY MACHINE OR YOUTUBE, SO I'M JUST LINKING TO THEM FOR NOW. WILL TRY CORRECT THIS LATER:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M0HfBE7E30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2H4RoMibko

Jordan

Planning For The First Submission

Minutes from the meeting on Wednesday February 2nd, 1pm.


We had a really constructive meeting today where we discussed how best to present our work so far for the first submission in a couple of weeks. Although we have not yet talked it over with our group supervisors, we felt it'd be beneficial to do some rough planning which we can adapt over the next few weeks. 


We aim to submit a written document, probably in the region of 2000 words, in which we will explain everything about our project so far. We spent a lot of time discussing what should be included in this document and what the structure should be etc. We came up with the following guideline...


------------------------
Overview/Proposal:


Give a brief introduction to the project and state our proposal. Our proposal will be along the lines of "using the art of circuit-bending we will transform seemingly dull instruments, as well as kids toys and other found objects, into new, exciting and eccentric sound-machines capable of producing vast and varied sound textures, far removed from their original forms. Using these hybrid instruments we will perform a semi-improvisational piece of music in front of our peers, probably at In Space. The performance may include elements of interactivity whereby audience members can participate by 'playing' these modified machines. Blah blah more stuff to add here........."


---Obviously it will be far more fleshed out than that, i've just written that quickly. Having a good proposal to follow will be useful throughout the project I feel, as it will give us a vague guide to follow.




Technical Goals:


In this section we will set out our aspirations in terms of building things / programming things etc. It's where we can talk about circuit bending and what it means, as well as anything else that is technical. We may choose to include:

• Explanations of the hacks and modifications we've made
• Details or further hacks and modifications we hope to make / are still making
• Building some of Clive's guitar pedals into our circuits
• Using an arduino for input / output and what we can do with this
• How we might make an interactive element and the problems that could arise from it
• Using foot controllers to trigger things (this links to the arduino stuff - there is only 3 of us so using hands as well as feet lets us do more)
• Visuals - hacking a gameboy? combining with Jitter?

---There is loads of things we could talk about here. Let's keep discussing it and figure out what to write about!

Creative Goals:

Here we avoid any geek-chat and talk about all things creative. The most obvious part would be our compositional goals, which we discussed a little today. Because we are still lacking in hacked instruments it's hard to plan compositional stuff, because we don't know what sounds we can produce. So we could say - "we want to more from atmospheric textures to a more granular, possibly beat-oriented section blah blah" - but we don't know if that is going to be possible yet. We have talked about the kind of things we'd like to be able to achieve; it feels silly to write those things down just now - so we can talk about this side of things more and get a real compositional goal written down once we are more confident. 

We can also talk about the actual performance here too; where? duration? visualisation? any interesting things we would like to incorporate to make it stand out from other presentations!? 

Problems:

A section to talk about the numerous problems we have encountered so far, such as circuits breaking easily, trouble getting our hands on equipment / things to bend. Hardware/software issues etc. We can say how we got round these problems and how we look to avoid future ones from happening.

Research:

Maybe have a section to talk about the reading we have done and how this has helped us so far. Whether its learning how to solder a toggle switch, or being inspired to hack a certain toy e.g. speak and spell. Not sure how much a section like this is needed?

Timeline/Plan/Summary:

Not really sure if all these things should have their own section or just be put together.

A timeline of our progression; this blog will come in handy! We can say what we did when.

Our plan/schedule for getting it done in time e.g. we aim to have all our modifications finished by week 9 so we can focus on compositional stuff from then on etc........

A summary of this whole document / the whole project - not sure if this is needed and what we would write if so! Just something to close with basically. 

-------------------------------------------------------------

All of the above is really open to change. We might choose to change the order of sections, or what is included in each section. Or that we don't need a section. It's just good to get ideas rolling early on so the final thing is as coherent and comprehensive as is needed.

We will soon delegate the writing of sections so we are not all writing the same thing! Saying that, if all 3 of us had a bash at writing a proposal, for instance, i'm sure we could use elements from each and have a really strong proposal.

We also plan to submit a few videos demonstrating our work. We have already made some of these, we did one today actually... i'll upload it in a separate post. We could have videos of individual hacks, possibly with some explanation narrated. It would be great to do a mini 'jam' video where the three of us improvise some music together to show an example of the sound textures we can create.

I'm going to stop writing now because this has gotten far too long and probably makes no sense! 

Jordan

Hardware Hacking Workshop - with Yann Seznec

Last Friday I attended the hardware hack workshop with Yann Seznec. The workshop was focussed around using micro controllers to control electronic components such as LED's, and also to get these controllers talking to a computer!


Firstly we covered some basic electronics and learned how to create simple circuits on a breadboard. Pictured below is a very basic circuit used to power an LED. There is a 9V battery connected which is out of the picture. The red wire from this battery supplies the power, the black wire supplies ground. If you zoom in on the picture you can see that the resistor has one leg plugged into the 'power row', the other leg is plugged into the same column as one of the LED legs. So the power runs through the resistor and into the LED (thus the resistor reduces the current to a more manageable amount for the LED). The other leg of the LED is connected to ground to complete the circuit. Hardly rocket science, i'm sure you'd agree!

A simple breadboard circuit

After this we looked at the 40106 chip, which is a micro controller similar to the arduino. We learned to turn two of the pins into an oscillator and by plugging the output into an amplifier we had a very fierce sound whose pitch we could alter using a potentiometer. I doubt we will use this chip in our project so I won't write any more on it just now, but for further reading go here: http://fluxmonkey.com/electronoize/40106Oscillator.htm It explains things far better than I could!

Circuit using the 40106 chip to power an LED

Then we got into the real exciting stuff: the arduino! This micro controller can be a powerful tool which we aim to use in this project. To summarise it briefly, by plugging it into a USB port on a computer you can send both digital and analogue signals to and from the computer and any other voltage-supplying item (a toy, instrument, display ). In a simple example we used a short piece of code to power an LED on and off repeatedly, causing a blinking effect. You must first download software to use with your machine: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

An Arduino Board

The arduino can also be used with Max/MSP which opens up many exciting avenues. Again there is a necessary download found here: http://www.maxuino.org/?page_id=12 So we could use Max patches to 'control' our hacked instrument and vice versa. This is an idea I really like. As there is only 3 of us it would be useful to be able to 'play' our hacks without even having to touch them, as we have written a program to do it for us! An example of this idea can be seen in the video below (which may or may not be using Max/MSP). We can also use information from the hacked toys to control parameters in our Max patches. For example, we could take live samples of our instruments during the first half of the performance, and 'call' these samples to be played in the second half using a specially hacked toy/instrument. Very exciting idea, which we will elaborate on in the near future.

Arduino board triggering electronic toys

It was a really interesting workshop which has inspired many ideas. I've only scratched the surface with a few here, but when we put our heads together I'm sure we will conjure up loads more!

Jordan

First Attempts...

I haven't been able to go toy-hunting yet, so thought I'd start out this weekend by ripping apart some of my old and un-used guitar pedals. A few might be interesting to try and hack; others I might just use to scavenge some parts. Some have incredibly simple ciruits, so I thought I'd look through them to remind myself what all the different components look like. Here's a distortion pedal that I started with:



Not really much to the circuit and nothing interesting to use in terms of this project, but I thought I'd play about with something easy at first - there's also very little to break here!

After familiarisng myself with the layout and components, I thought I'd try something more interesting/uesful. I got an analog delay pedal from ebay a year or so ago that can be pushed into self-osscilation to make some really crazy sounds, so thought I'd have a look and see what else I could force it to do. The circuit board is much more complex:



This pedal never really worked properly; the delayed signal was always really faint and garbled unless you powered it with an 18v supply - strange for a pedal that is supposed to run from a single 9v battery! Since it wasn't really working properly, I thought I'd dive right in and make some noise. Unfortunately, this approach backfired as the pedal died as soon as I touched a wire to one of the chips:(

So, my first attempts have not been too successful. However, I do have all the tools and parts that I need to get started properly, I just need to get something easier to work on. I have a drum machine, minidisc recorder, iPod nano and an old mobile phone that I was hoping to use for this project, but don't want to see them go the same way as my delay pedal. I think some practice on some cheap toys might be the best option...

Clive

First Attempts At Hacking...

Earlier this week I gave circuit bending a crack for the first time. I only had a few jumper cables and a soldering iron so couldn't do things like attach switches etc. I was just trying to familiarise myself with opening toys, and looking around circuit boards.

The first toy I tried is pictured below. I didn't get very far; i connected two points on the board that caused the sound AND lights to die, and it wouldn't come back on, even after turning it off, changing batteries etc.  Very annoying - I thought that wasn't supposed to happen! I wasn't using a soldering iron or anything. Ah well, BALL-E as he's now known died a premature death :-/

BALL-E : 2010 - 2011

I moved through a few other devices, only really managing to adjust pitch by using body contact. Couldn't find anything interesting... though the toy collection I currently have is a tad undernourished. I managed to make a really old talking phone do this:

Circuit-Bent Toy Phone - Looping/Pitch Bend

Apologies for the crummy vid quality. I figured out how to loop a sample by connecting to points. I did not solder these together, just made loops in the ends of the cables so they could hang round each other hence stay in contact. I have some hi-res pics but cannot upload them just yet. By rubbing my thumb on one part it changed the pitch. Got some really interesting low tones out of this which I imagine could soon pretty decent when output through loudspeakers via a 1/4" jack connection. 

I also started prodding around my mini Yamaha PortaSound organ and this is looking far more promising. I've found some cool things such as adding distortion (and other strange noises) and merging beats on the drum machine.

Opened Yamaha PortaSound

I've ordered a bunch of components from an electronics website. Hopefully I get the stuff early next week so I can make something to bring to our next meeting -- I think on Wednesday.

Jordan

Learning To Hack

Today we met again with Brad and Eleni showing us some basic hacking skills. We opened a couple of toys and had a poke around with some wires. 


We learned to work around the 'audio brains' of a circuit, normally identified by a small black blob or spider-looking thing! We are told that these are the scientific terms for such items. 


Due to the short amount of time and lack of resources today we never got much in the way of solid hacks happening, but the three of us got a clear idea of how to go around it. It's up to us to familiarise ourselves with the 'art' in our own time. 


We plan to work on some individual hacks and show each other our work next wednesday. Once we start getting some circuit-bent instruments we can begin wrapping our heads around the compositional/interactive aspect of the project.


There is a lecture on hardware hacking tomorrow and a workshop on Friday, so by this time next week we should all be experts! Here's hoping...


Oh, and we never got round to taking much in the way of pics/vids bar this fuzzy snap:

It's a keyboard which Eleni's boyfriend hacked and includes contacts pins as well as a looping mechanism... very nice!

First meeting and initial discussions

So here goes the first blog post i've ever made...




Last week the Unwanted Orchestra DMSP group met for the first time. Tutored by Bradley Burns and Eleni Kontesidou, the group consists of:

Jordan Craig

Clive Mitchell

Zhaocheng Xu

Our project is to do with the art of circuit bending, particularly on kids musical toys such as keyboards, speak n' spells etc. With no prior knowledge of this craft, we will learn to modify and transform seemingly dull 'toys' into interesting and eccentric 'instruments'!


We had a quick chat about what the ultimate goal of the project will be. It seems most likely we will create a piece of semi-improvisational music and perform it in front of an audience. 


Extensions of this were discussed with a view of adding an interactive element to the performance, where audience members can participate by 'playing' the modified instruments along with the 3 of us. Obvious alarm bells start ringing here, of course. What happens if an audience member abuses or breaks an instrument? Can we control an audience member's output so that it is not musically detrimental to the piece? How do we communicate our ideas to audience members? Suffice it to say, there are a lot of potential issues we would have to prepare for but it'd be really cool to get this happening. Perhaps split the performance so one half is played by us, the other half is more of an installation? Who knows what we'll do!


We also talked about linking some hacked toys up to a laptop via an arduino board, so that the laptop could control elements of the toy, but the toy could also be used to trigger 'things' from the laptop. What these 'things' would be is hard to say as we wouldn't want to use any pre-recorded audio. Perhaps we could record live samples of sounds generated during the performance and use these hybrid arduino-toys to trigger that audio from a Max/MSP buffer!? All very hypothetical just now, but we wanted to get as many ideas rolling as possible. 


We also liked the idea of getting our hands on some old games consoles and 'hacking' them to give us some visuals. We could use a projector to expand these images. Perhaps we could also find a way to link the visuals to the music... I know absolutely ZERO about console hacking and so don't know if this is possible - but it's a nice thought!




Research Articles

The Folk Music of Chance Electronics: Circuit-Bending the Modern Coconut 

Qubais Reed Ghazala

Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 14, Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor (2004), pp. 96-104

Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor

Nicolas Collins

Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 14, Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor (2004), pp. 1-3

Getting Started In Electronics

Forrest M. Mims

Handmade Electronic Music - The Art Of Hardware Hacking

Nicolas Collins

Videos

I thought it'd be a good idea to post a few interesting/helpful videos each week, so here goes nothing...

A simple circuit bending example

A hacked nintendo controlled by modular synthesiser 

This circuit bent keyboard has had an LFO added

Anything by noystoise is generally good

Next meeting: Wednesday January 26th, 1pm