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.

__________________________________________


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.