Circuit Bending: Performance Day

Today was Performance Day. It was pretty fun and turned out better than I thought it would. Initially I thought it would be a total mess because nobody had a clue what they were going to do, but everything worked out great and I really enjoyed it. So for this little project I'm satisfied with the outcome. I liked how we worked together as well. It wasn't so structured and planned like it usually is. I think I'm starting to get used to working without a plan that's too rigid. Even without a strict structure time management was near perfect.

Overall, it was a great performance.



Now on to my favourite groups for today.

My absolute favourite was Tom T's group. Tom did the mixing for my group, so huge thanks to him. He set up everyone's audio on the mixer as well so of course we're all thankful for it. Anyway, this group's sounds were my absolute favourite. The guitar was beautiful and made a beautiful contrast with the electronic noises. I liked the crescendo as well. I'm not sure if my group did any dynamics, but if there's one thing to improve on I think we could have played around with dynamics a bit more.

Nick's group was the most fun and interesting to watch. I loved the various objects he brought in for the live performance. My favourite was the rubber bands.

Rachael's group was lovely too. Everything worked and flowed together beautifully. I liked how there were moments that were quieter and how the sound of the string she was playing worked with everything else. Cory's expressions were fun and entertaining too.

Sam D's group was also a favourite of mine. I loved the subtle paper-tearing noise Shams was doing and my favourite was Sam destroying and stabbing his toy to pieces.


Contribution:
In this week’s performance it is much easier to outline what each person did since we all had to have our own circuits to bend.

I built two separate circuits from JayCar circuit kits. One was the hee-haw siren and the other was the cricket oscillator, which would chirp as it picks up sounds to trigger its chirp. I thought the cricket oscillator would give a good layer to the sounds and harmonise nicely with the other circuits while it is being triggered by them.

Since a requirement in the brief was life sounds captured by the contact mics I also made extra contact mics for my group to use. This was because we did not have enough mics in the first place since they break easily, and to give greater flexibility in getting live sounds through the mics. This way the group can have more layers of sound in the performance. There were four in total used in the performance; all of them were made by me.

Since we had to have a layer of pre-recorded sounds playing as well, I also recorded some more new sounds including the twisting of a Rubik’s cube, smashing teacups together, swallowing of tea, a heartbeat, and a flowing sand-timer. I also gave the field recordings from my previous group to Jenna to play, since she was in change of playing the pre-recorded sounds for the performance.

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I can't wait till next week for the instrument-building project. I think it's going to be the most enjoyable out of all the sound projects so far.

Circuit Bending: Putting together my instrument and deciding on roles

Made some more piezo mics last night. These are for the live contact mic performance in our improv. I made them for next week's instrument-making project as well, since they might come in handy. They took forever to make because at home there's not much to hold each bit steady for easier soldering.



Also put the cricket together last night. Today I searched out all the good spots for bending the sounds. I chose the pins that changed the pitch and the pins which controls the speed at which it oscillates. Added a potentiometer to control each one.

Today in our groups we decided what role each of us will play during the improv performance. Me, Dexter, and Brian will be bending circuits live while Supa would be doing live piezo mic work and Jenna will be handling the recordings with Virtual DJ.


To make my circuit easier to play during the performance I mounted the entire thing on a piece of wood. This makes it easier because both my hands would be free to turn any of the knobs. If it weren't mounted I'd have to have one hand holding them still and the other doing the turning. I've also mounted it specially so that the mic of the cricket is right beside the speaker of the siren. This is so that the mic would pick up the siren and activate its own sound.


Today there were also some interesting videos and an interesting speaker as well.

My favourite was Clara Rockmore playing on the theremin. Absolutely beautiful and sounds just like a violin. If I wasn't looking I would've thought it was a real violin. It's interesting how electronics can mimic a large variety of other sounds. I guess that one cool thing about circuit bending is that within the circuit you've stored a range of sounds. So if you want a particular sound for a movie, music video, etc you don't have to have the real instrument or the real thing to get the sound since they're found inside a particular circuit. One thing I want to know more about sound would be something extremely impermanent. For example, fireworks. I think fireworks are an artform and once they burn out they're gone forever and you can't get another one unless you burn another. I want something impermanent like that in sound. A sound that lasts for a short time that you can never get back. EVER.

Anyway, another cool video was Alvin Lucier and his contact mics reacting to his bodily functions and brainwaves to play different drums. I've thought about turning brainwaves into sound before, but never really thought about the means of doing it. So that was quite interesting for me. Something even more amazing would be to turn the brainwaves into sound, then decipher the sound made by the brainwaves to see what the person is thinking. I wonder if that would be too intrusive though, the idea that you can literally hear what a person is thinking through deciphering their brainwaves music.

Clinton was our guest speaker today. His work shows the relationship between sound and graphics, especially in circuit bending for both sound and visuals. I loved the seizure-causing graphics and how it lights up his exhibition spaces. I especially liked his palette of colours because they were limited and felt really clean and sharp.

Circuit Bending: A start

We got shown a video in the morning that really shows the potential for the contact mics to record some interesting sounds. I think it also showed some great aesthetics as well with the bottle caps but that's not the point.

I think this morning's little lecture was more useful for next week's instrument-making though. Despite that, it did show us an example of how to creatively use the contact mics. I'm thinking about getting the liquid electric tape. I'd like to try out listening to water turning to ice, and ice melting into water.

Later we did body contact on the circuits by wetting our fingers and moving them across the circuit to find any interesting areas that alter the sounds. For my circuit it was really good. There were 3 main areas and all of them respond. The key thing though, is that for Group 2 and Group 3 to work area 1 has to be touched first before they respond.

Group 1: Changes pitch across a huge range
Group 2: Wobbles the pitch (oscillation?)
Group 3: Gives a few different clear notes that are within range of the pitch

Tonight I'm going to add a potentiometer to it to change the pitch for me. Because when you do body contact your body acts as a giant resistor, so I think that should work fine. Before I do that I want to make sure that I know what parts of the circuit do what first by probing it, and to find any more interesting parts of the circuit that I missed. I want to add some switches too, because for my circuit it can't turn on or off unless I add/remove the battery. I'm going to put together the cricket circuit from JayCar as well. I think it would be cool to have it working with my siren circuit because the cricket circuit doesn't make a sound until another sound sets it off first. So the sound of the siren can activate the cricket, which would make it a great two-part circuit that's really one instrument.

I want to be able to connect both of the circuits with this type of switch. But can't figure out how to connect it properly. So when I get home today I'll try figure that out.


Ok, I added a potentiometer to the circuit and fiddled around with it. There are 5pairs of points, and one particular pair is really good for changing the pitch. So I'll solder that on once I've worked out the second circuits good points too.

Stefan from Pumice came along and did a little performance for us as an example today as well. I liked it, but I thought it was far too loud. At several points I had to cover my ears so that they wouldn't get hurt. My favourite was when he had the tuning forks and the telephone receiver.

Overall, from today I think circuit bending can be really good for making sounds for movies. From my one, at one point I got bagpipes, sounds of very shrill birds, child screaming, and many more. It can also be a new advancement in music, maybe a new movement or a new genre.

Circuit Bending: Intro

Over the weekend I bought one of the JayCar kits for the soundchip. I got the siren one and later I got the cricket one as well in case I mess up on the siren, so at least I'll have a spare. It was quite fun putting it together. In the instructions it tells you how to change the pitch and how fast the hee-haw sound goes as well.

I also did a tiny bit of research over the weekend about circuit bending to see what it's about. So I found a little tutorial on instructables and a pretty detailed explanation on how to circuit bend on another website. I'll probably refer to these a lot if I get lost. One thing that I'd really like to try is body contact. I'm not sure if this is possible, but maybe joining multiple circuits together to see what happens.

We got introduced to various components today as well. I don't know anything about those so I'm likely to ask around if I don't know anything and probably get Tom T to help, since he's really good at this sort of thing.





We made some mics today, which was fun for me since I actually like soldering. I'm planning to make a couple more for next week's project over the weekend as well.

Did some short recordings. I didn't like them though, because they weren't interesting enough so I didn't save anything. One was scissors snapping together, table scrape, tapping, and the computer fan. For some reason they sounded really similar. Maybe if I use a larger piezo disc the effect would be better.

Field Recordings: Presentation Day

Mundane Monday is the title of our final composition. You can click on the link there to listen to it on SoundCloud. I think for a first try it's reasonably good. I'm not 100% satisfied with it though for some reason, but that might be because I'm never really satisfied with anything. Overall, it was a good effort and there could be more development and improvements in the process of making it and the final composition itself.

Listening to other groups' compositions some really stood out to me. My favourite was Jared's group's one, which was the very first one. I really hated it to be honest, but in a good way. Hopefully that makes sense. I hated it because it was a horrible sound and it sounded like I was drowning. Especially with the lights turned off it disorientated me even more in combination with the sweeping effect of the stereos set to 180. Being deprived of sight and hearing all these sounds is really scary, because I'm strongly visual as well. It was fantastic though because it provoked such a strong reaction in me, which is why I hate it in a good way.

Nick's group's one was lovely too. My favourite part is when you hear the nails being dropped making a nice twinkly sound.

Sam J's group's was quite calming and was quite different from other groups' compositions because it was more subtle with a great crescendo with high pitched squeaks accenting that sound of calmness going on in the background. The shrill sound of the squeaks kind of hurt my ears as they got louder and louder, quite distressing as well because you wonder when they would stop. The contrast in my view with the calm background is lovely.

These three compositions were the best for me because of their effect on feelings and hearing some of my favourite sounds in them. One sound that I'd like to hear some time is glass breaking. I love the sound of breaking glass.


Contribution:
For this field recordings mini-project for sound my main contributions to the group were assembling the group at the beginning, organising the group, and time management throughout the week on what needs to be done each day in time for hand-in at the end of the week.

Shared contributions between members were of course doing the recordings and putting the recordings together. We took turns recording so that everybody had a chance to record sounds that they liked. For me I recorded some tapping and scraping sounds on various surfaces, some while we were walking down Queen Street and one with rotating the mic constantly to get a sweeping effect while walking down the street. After all recordings were done I listened to every recording to name all the files so that we would remember what each one sounded like from the name, which would make putting them together a lot easier and faster.

For putting the recordings together I was not sure what to do for it to be honest, so I let my other team mates who had a better idea on how to put them together take charge in that aspect of the process. My role in putting it together was listening to what my team mates had put together and deciding which parts were fine and which parts I thought were horrible, adding in recordings I think would fit in, and rearranging the recordings already there when necessary.


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A little apprehensive about circuit bending next week. Mainly because I'm not very confident with circuitry. However, I'm going to try my best and do the best I can. As always time will be managed meticulously for optimum working time and room for optimum length of time to sleep of course.

Field Recordings: Put everything together

Last night I sorted the tracks I liked into a folder and then colour coded them to. The green ones are purely natural sounds, the yellow ones are natural sounds with evidence of human existence in them, the orange ones are city sounds with sounds of humans, and the red ones are pure city sounds that are common to hear in the city.

We're not going with that idea anymore though because it turns out that a lot of groups already have the same idea as us. We want to break away from that and have a more unique track of sounds to playback. It's probably because we're over-thinking this composition and not really treating the sounds purely as sounds and letting the source of the sound take over the composition instead of the actual quality and feel of the sounds.


Our composition got put together on Emile's laptop. Emile started with the basic frame of it, then I messed up the order in the middle, and Cory tweaked it up and made some changes. Chris then came back and gave us her opinion on it, then fixed up some small things together. Now all we need to do is do the final edit tomorrow morning and export it as an MP3 for our blogs. It's interesting how we mashed everything together and how in the end it sounded like something that made sense. To me, it sounds like being distracted in the classroom. When you're in class and a whole lot is happening outside distracting you.

I'm not used to how we put our composition together to be honest. It was really unplanned and experimental. I'm more used to having everything planned and structured so I think I should do this more to be able to be more flexible and work with different approaches. I think using this experimental approach would be better for usual studio work as well because it gives you the freedom to develop your ideas/concepts instead of pinning down something that's concrete and too literal.


In class today we got shown more examples of turning noise into art. When I was at home I did do a little looking around and saw a video about Pierre Schaeffer as well involving Musique Concrete. I didn't like it much though because I thought those particular noises were annoying and didn't invoke any particular emotion in me other than annoyance.

Dead C was quite nice though. I loved their noise but not their vocals. I think the vocals really ruined it for me because it sounded like they were trying to sing but failed. I think it would be better if they were trying to sound horrible on purpose. It's like my appreciation for green tea. It tastes unpleasant because it tastes like mud. But I like it because it makes me appreciate everything else a bit more.

Kusum Normoyle's screams were fun to watch and interesting to listen to. I actually have a fascination with screams and sometimes I have random moods to hear screams, especially when I'm angry with someone or when I feel depressed. I think what that says about me is that I really really want to take my anger out on people who angered me, but I refrain. That doesn't mean the desire is any less strong though.

The Zune Lee lecture in all honesty was boring. But his work seemed to be really fun to play with. I loved the game where the vocalists and fish affect the game. The fish one is fun because I imagine that it would feel like you're playing with the fish. It makes fish seem more exciting as a pet. My absolute favourite was the audio-visual juice and cocktails. It makes the preparation of juice and cocktails more fun and exciting. I wonder if it tastes good though.

Field Recordings: The beginnings of an idea

We brainstormed a bit about our idea for the composition today and went out to get more recordings. So far we're exploring the sounds of nature existing in the mechanical city with all its sounds of machinery and cars. Also a sonic timeline of nature by itself evolving into a city with human inhabitation as the population of humans grow.

We went on the sound walk today as well. It got boring after a while though because we went to similar places with similar sound. There wasn't much variety. So in the composition it would probably be more interesting to have a variety of sounds and to have some contrast between sounds as well.




This is the video our lecturer showed us about Loren Chasse. He interacts with things in his environment, turning the environment in to his musical instrument. I think my group is leaning more towards a Loren Chasse kind of approach to the composition and selection of sounds. This is because we found that a lot of our favourite sounds recorded from yesterday were mainly made from human interaction with nature such as walking in the park, the movement of twigs in response to human contact, and so on.





This is John Cage's silent performance, also shown to us by our lecturer. I think before this I didn't really think about silence in the composition, thinking that the entire length of time should be filled with sound. This made me appreciate the existence of silence and how it can work in compositions instead of having constant sound happening. I think the silence makes the audience listen more carefully, waiting for the next sound to happen. It also makes the music piece have room to breathe; like the use of whitespace in graphic design.

At the beginning of the video there's a voiceover where John Cage says "The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing." This sums up what I'm saying quite nicely about the importance of silence in composing. I think what a lot of us forgot was that compositions don't have to be made entirely out of sound, they can have areas of silence as well as long as they are used with reason like every other component of the composition.





Near the end John Cage says something that German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, "There are two things that don't have to mean anything. One is music and the other is laughter." This helped me understand what our project is about a little more. The aim of the brief is to create a "sound moment". An experience or sensation. Thus, it doesn't necessarily have to have some deep, philosophical meaning. So for now I think since our ideas are still developing, we don't need to nail down a meaning yet. For now we should just experiment, go with the flow, and see where that takes us.





This is Futurist music by Luigi Russolo, which centres around the "art of noise". Here he combines ambient noise, dissonant sounds, and musical instruments. It's quite an interesting piece in my opinion. It gets annoying at some points though because there's no break in the sound. The sound itself though is something that we can play with. I like how in this piece there's the ambient noise as the background and the layering of each sound is lovely too. It's also interesting how there doesn't seem to be a set beat or time signature for it as well.

I think this is something that we can think about when we do our composition. Consider the layering and where all the sounds are in the composition. Be careful not to create a looped beat as well because we're not after traditional composition here as we are creating a moment in sound rather than a sound track for the purpose of entertainment like orchestral music. I think it's more about making the listener more aware of sounds commonly encountered in every day life, thus encouraging people to pay more attention to their hearing. I'm hoping that in our composition we can make it feel like listening to a changing landscape; going from a lovely forest to a concrete city.

Field Recordings: First mini sound project

Today was quite a fun day to be honest. The morning was a little bit boring and a little disappointing for me though.

I was with the half of the class that went to learn about the basic physics of sound and hearing and went into the reverberation and anechoic rooms.

The physics of sound was rather boring, but it’s still good to know how sound works for this project and gain a better understanding of it. One thing that caught my attention was the difference between a sound and a noise. We didn’t delve into a debate about that but I think that could be something we can explore later on with our one-week sound projects.

Later we had a brief visit to the reverberation room and anechoic room. The reverberation room was really cold and felt really hard. That’s probably because the materials it’s covered in is hard and smooth, so it reflects the sound off the surfaces giving that immense echo. I loved that, it was like being in a cave.

My favourite out of the two rooms is the anechoic room because it’s warm, bouncy, and it felt mushy because it was covered in sponge. It disappointed me though because nothing particularly cool happened. I was expecting a feeling of being pressurized and a sense of vertigo causing major discomfort and strangeness. However, it felt really normal. Just quiet and closed, with a barely audible humming in my ear.

The anechoic room made me think about something that my piano teacher once told me: Silence doesn’t exist. In the anechoic room when nobody makes a sound it's supposed to be completely quiet. So when the lights turn off you hear your pulse if it's a really well-made anechoic room. Therefore, it doesn't matter whether “silence” is emulated or not, you will still hear what's going on inside you such as your pulse, your breathing, and so on.

The afternoon is the part that I look forward to in EVERY project: Gathering my group members. I loved it today! I’ve mastered choosing who I want to work with in top speed and gathering them before anyone else can. I knew that always at the beginning of every project when the lecturer would say “Alright guys, sort yourselves out into your groups” there is a very short length of time that is the golden time for people like me who want to grab all the people I want in my group. It’s the first two minutes where nearly every classmate is in a state of apprehension and confusion as to how to form a group, specifically who to form a group with. I had no problem with that today because I’ve been working hard in the holidays planning out all my potential groups.

For the sound projects I had a specific group design going for a particular feel in combination with the various personalities I think would go fantastic with what we’re doing. In this project I’m working with Emile, Chris Lee, and Cory Beduhn. Emile’s a light blue, Chris is a cross between orange and blue while Cory is yellow with a bit of orange mixed in. I’m a medium blue. Now let me explain how I think this combo would work.

There are a few magic pairs in the class. These pairs of people are amazing because when you put them together it sets the atmosphere and tone of the group much more strongly than people who are a pure colour. What I mean by pure colour is when a person is, for example, strongly blue they possess blue attributes at the highest level. Chris and Cory are such a pair. This pair has a very warm feel, with medium high energy. Since Chris has more orange in her she gives a spark to ideas while the blue in her gives her that strong focus. Combined with Cory, who complements these qualities, the attributes in both people work together beautifully. So we’ve got a nice spark going on. This is why we have Emile. I think he has a knack for finding unique, unusual things. This quality I value very much, particularly in this sound project because I want something different from what most people would think of to happen. So Emile is chosen to give that extra little push in creating an idea. His attention to detail helps as well. I’m there to organise everything to make sure that all goals are completed according to our ideal mini-deadlines before the final deadline so that we have plenty of time to make mistakes, experiment, and of course finish our composition on time while making it the best composition we can.

I should draw a chart to really explain in full detail how my colour method works for choosing groups. More on that later.

After forming a group and getting a basic plan down for the week we went out to record some sounds to try it out, then tomorrow we can pick out the sounds we like and go out to record any more additional sounds we’d like to add. The idea is to find sounds and noises that we overlook in our environment. I really enjoyed that, it was fun for me.

It’s pretty amazing what you can hear through that mic. My favourite sound that we recorded that day was the sound of deep fried Korean food being made. I think it was the best sound of the day because you can hear the oil boiling and it sounds amazing.

We looked really hilarious when we recorded the sounds, the expressions and reactions of the public were hilarious too. Chris was trying to get the sound of a pigeon so she was following one around. It looked like she was stalking it and she looked really focused. The funniest ones were when Emile was running after a rolling grapefruit and when he was being an extremely conspicuous spy sticking the mic through the window in to an Auckland Uni class.