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