Overdue Update

Since September, I've been teaching English in France, so that's why there haven't been any updates here. There is, however, a new blog that Sarah and I have created for that, if you're interested: Sarah and Brendan in France. No electronic supplies = No Futuree Electrode. But I'm getting all my stuff shipped to France, since I've found myself with more free time than I know what to do with, so I should start building soon. I also found an electronics hobby shop right down the street from me in Tours, France - Radio-Son!

Anyway, to get myself back into a futuree mindset, I thought I would try to write something on the theoretical end of the Osc-A-Lot, my last instrument. When I'm building, the last thing I want to do is try to write or think about what I'm doing - I always start out with a really basic concept that then is realized (often in a different way) in construction. Documenting comes later, and can be a useful exercise in rediscovering forgotten concepts or corridors that I considered, then abandoned along the way.

So, with the Osc-A-Lot, my initial concept was:

a sculptural garden of sound, light (from LEDS) comes down from above onto photoresistors to create sounds. the sounds will be spatialized through multiple small speakers to cement the garden's location in space and as a "sound/object" rather than a synthesizer.

The first build of the Osc-A-Lot, called the Pizzillator, which I presented as my final for Ron Kuivila's course at Wesleyan, "Computers and Music", reflected this idea pretty closely. The photoresistors were in a small circle, like a little garden, and the lights shone down from above. The oscillators were "listened in on" with small speaker modules (386 amps taped to speakers), which were placed around the system. Sound/electrical signals can travel through air, so the instrument was actually "played" with the speakers - no wires were attached from speaker to sound generation - instead the speakers were moved by hand over and around the Pizzillator, to hear different parts of the instrument sound. The simplest analog is a metal detector, where you "play" sounds (metal objects in the ground) by moving the amplifier (metal detector), rather than playing the instrument itself. It's an exercise in using speakers as instruments - but not in the David Tudor/"Rainforest" way, where the speakers' locations are fixed.

Building

I decided to make my Pizzilator prototype into an instrument for Sarah's birthday. I wanted to create something that retained the concept of 'sculptural electronics' but was more playable as an instrument.

For my final project in Ron's class, I had focused on playing the Pizzilator by moving the speakers, but there were three other ways to play it that I hadn't explored fully:

1) Moving the LEDs closer and farther away from the photoresistors.

2) Changing the frequency of the oscillators by changing resistance through potentiometers.

3)Changing the frequency of the blinking LEDs.

So for this new, more playable instrument, I mounted the LEDs on flexible wire that can be bent many times, in every imaginable direction. I also added pots to control the frequency of the oscillators. In this new configuration, the pots served as 'coarse tuning', and the photoresistors as fine tuners. I could reveal subtleties of the interaction of oscillators more easily by giving myself more frequency control.

Making the LEDs blink dramatically faster or slower was a radical development. I made some of the LEDs have phases of as long as one minute. With this configuration, my new instrument (now called the Osc-A-Lot) could produce minimalist phase music. The composer could bend the wires to a configuration, set the LEDs to different frequencies, and then leave the instrument alone so a piece could unfold by itself over the course of hours. The Osc-A-Lot, then, could be played like an electronic instrument, by moving the wires and changing frequencies frequently, or treated as a music-box: once set in motion, the music unfolds on its own.