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
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