Mouse/Trackpad

My pal David and I using boring old input devices to control granular Max patches:

(from December of last year)

TttTtttTTthe Conversation

Fuzz box

I built this for Jess. The switch at the top is the only control-- down for overdrive, up for fuzz. Bottom switch is power, right eye input, left eye output.

_

Here's something I've been working on this semester:


It's a series of live mixes, using a modular synthesizer, sheets of metal and reverb units as the sound sources. The "presentation version," which I'll be debuting in a couple of hours, features two 7-foot sheets of aluminum, wired as reverberant amplifiers, as the rear channels of a 4-channel playback system:

Tiny passive nearfields

I had a couple of 2" paper cone speakers lying around and was looking for an excuse to get back on the laser cutter. A $2 investment in Masonite later, I built these:




The "S"/"M" (speaker/microphone) switch flips the polarity on the speaker.

Not surprisingly, they sound like third-hand Auratones... I'm going to work on the enclosure design and source other speaker types to see if I can get some semblance of bass response out of these things. In the meantime, I think they look nice and will work fine as special effect speakers. Success!

Amp kit ver 1.1

Now with a battery holder (and reorganized parts)!


Version 1.1 and 1.0:

First Eagle-to-prototype PCB

One of my projects for the summer was to learn Eagle and design/build something with it. Luckily, this dovetailed with a work thing-- redesigning the PCB for a mono-in/stereo-out headphone amplifier kit.

The prototype was etched yesterday:


...and drilled, populated and tested (works!) earlier this afternoon:


I have a feeling this is going to make the hobby-to-addiction leap fast.

New stereo preamp

I found a perfect little tape player for our back porch the other day (wood siding, with matching speakers- $5!) but needed a receiver or some kind of amplifier to boost its signal. Luckily, I had a pair of preamp circuits laying around and some time on my hands, so I built this:



1/16" laser cut acrylic, 6 pieces, no glue or screws. RCA ins and outs on the back, stereo 1/8" I/O on the front, along with ganged stereo volume and power switch/LED for each preamp. I realize this is technically a pair of mono blocks (and not true stereo), but let's all just stop being nerds for a minute and be happy that it works.

The acrylic is clear-- I had to cover the back in masking tape when cutting it, and was surprised to find that I liked the way it looked covered. I'll probably re-cut the housing out of balsa or something equally thin that I can stain to match its tape deck buddy, seen here in their natural habitat:

I finally got my hands on a laser

I've been waiting years to make something with a laser! Like most people, my first impulse was to pop a giant bag of popcorn, but since time was short, I cut out my first prototype of a 6U case I've been working on instead, with box joints, spaces removed in the back for a uZeus power supply and I/O for a reverb tank (the driver will be mounted in the rails as a 4HP module).

Being a prototype, I cut it out of scrap cardboard. For the final version--which is still a few revisions away--I'll use something nice. Bamboo maybe. Here's one of the corners from today's version:


I'll be working on this all week and will hopefully have something a little more substantial to show by Friday.

Project for school

Should be finished next week. Photos/details then!

New distro boards!

David from Bubblesound was kind enough to show me the "build your own bus board" ropes tonight, helping me solder together three chain-able boards. Aren't they pretty?


Seriously, seriously big thanks to David for helping me with the project. Fingers crossed, I'll finally be able to power all of our modules simultaneously! Look for an update to that effect tomorrow night.

UPDATE:


Good news: everything powers simultaneously. Bad news: the power supply isn't strong enough for two rows of modules. Hmph. Luckily, Modular World just (literally-- this was released yesterday) put out a new 2000mA supply that will do nicely.

Found Sound Update

Waveshield: mostly soldered

 Triple Wide Extender: Extending

Radio: Removed from cabinet

New home for the machine

Next up: Get 1/3 of it to work, starting with the waveshield (which does the audio playback). The project is due in two weeks!

Found Sound

I'm always a bit quiet on the blog when I'm in school, but I'm finally getting towards the end of my program, which means I'm indulging myself and taking classes that I can't totally justify professionally, but that satisfy some of the creative-librarianship tendencies that got me to apply in the first place.

I've had the idea for a found sound archive for quite some time, but I wanted to build a really good interface for field recordings. Something you can touch and move. I'm building a prototype as a final project for my Programming for Interactivity class. Here's the gist:

I bought this cabinet with a built-in radio online:

The ultimate goal is to build in an RFID reader and fill the drawers with RFID-tagged objects, and an SD card with field recordings linked to those RFIDs. When an object is placed on the reader, the related sound recording will play back. It sounds simple, but there are a bunch of intermediary steps that I haven't totally worked out yet. Like how to play back the sound. Ideally, I could just wire the Arduino to the speaker on the built-in radio in the cabinet, but I think I need an intermediary. And all the intermediaries I find seem to output in mono, which is fine, except that it's field recordings, and in a perfect world, you'd be playing with this thing, wearing headphones, and you'd pick out an object, like a little bird, and you'd put the bird on the reader and then you'd be surrounded by birdsong and you'd forget where you are for a split second. Mono is just not going to cut it. But that's okay. This is the prototype, right?

Updates as I have them. My first task is to get the RFID reader to read an RFID tag. Wish me luck!

Shamblers Halloween party mix

Sounds best loud.

Happy Halloween!!

Cassette loop drone

I chopped together a blank tape loop yesterday, and have been using it with the 4-track pretty much nonstop since:

Same video, processed through the modular:

200 jacks

Today at work a package arrived for me with 200 1/8" jacks in it!



Our new modules are that much closer to being built!

Speaker as fixed EQ

I was making digital copies of dictaphone tapes this afternoon, and while doing so came to the conclusion that I prefer the sound of the tapes through the recorder's internal speaker over the sound of the tapes directly.

So, to get more of the sound I wanted into the computer, I set a 57 an inch or so off the speaker's center and pressed record-- it's a much closer copy of what I want than simply running the headphone output into a mixer.


Have any of you tried this? Do you have a favorite mic for the job? I haven't done much experimenting (and don't have the biggest mic closet in the world), but if this is something you've done or do often and can recommend a set-up, let me know-- I'd love to hear about/try it!

New utility box on the way

Our (mostly finished) new utility box:


Two A/B selectors, one mute switch, two momentary 9v gates (w/ snazzy green LEDs) and two passive OR circuits. Might try to squeeze a multiple in there as well...

Next on the list are the synth PCBs we've been "collecting." I've finally started sourcing parts for them, and we should have at least one of them coming together in the next month or so. Details/photos SOON!

Knitting the News

I'm studying for my Programming for Interactivity class, which mostly means collecting examples of projects using the programming environment(?)language(?) Processing, a longtime crush of mine. In the midst of this, I happened upon a knitting project called News Knitter that uses Processing, somehow, to create visual representations of the news, translate these to a knitting machine and then make sweaters, comme ca:

 

 This reminds me, of course, of the less high-tech (though still knitting-machine based) work of Lisa Anne Auerbach's sweater/skirts, which are often news-related:

 There are a few great things about machine-knitted sweaters, and the most obvious being that they don't take as long to make, and you can pretty easily (if you're computer-savvy) create complex patterns that would be difficult to hand-knit, if not impossible. In both of these projects, that ease and speed are used to create complex and context-based sweaters that will be not only out of fashion but literally out of date in a relatively short period of time, memorializing and creating a lasting physical record of contemporary events.

The News Knitters also make more abstract representations of news visualization, which may withstand the test of time slightly better, and are taking names in the hopes that they might offer the sweaters for sale someday.

 All of this ties in very nicely with my interest in the idea of our everyday life objects forming our own personal living archives, and my very real desire to never ever ever get rid of the awesomely comfortable and nearly worn out t-shirt I was wearing when Pete & I first met.

Do your hand-made projects end up representing specific times and places for you? Do you think of your drawer of hand-knit socks as an archive of your progress as a knitter or as a person? Is it totally unreasonable to save clothing when it's no longer wearable for sentimental/archival reasons?

Gold Sounds

I needed to change the color of a couple of jacks for a project I'm working on. I thought about using spray paint but was worried that it would cause too much of a mess inside the jack itself.

I ended up using a Sharpie paint marker, which worked like a dream. Really fast and easy, with hardly any drying time.


If you're the sort of person who wants to color code your I/O, pick one up! Just be sure to paint the jacks before you install them (helping hands are, excuse the pun, very handy for this sort of thing)...