Weird Sound Generator

Posted on March 15, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

This weekend I completed building a Weird Sound Generator, or WSG, component kit from Music From Outer Space. The kit comes with a printed circuit board and all the electronics, including resistors, capacitors, diodes, ICs, potentiometers, switches, and wires. The rest, like the housing, faceplate, and soldering is up to the builder.

I built a box similar to the recommended specifications and cut the faceplate out of an old computer case. The wood I used was scraps that I held onto and recycled. In fact, I managed built the entire instrument without buying anything beyond the kit itself. Even the stain, nails, glue, screws, and backing board were materials that I had hoarded from previous projects over the years.

It took me about thirteen hours to complete. But, it was a fun thirteen hours of playing with my soldering iron and power tools while following instructions, or coming up with a way to cut through metal, or mount a nine volt battery inside an already cramped case. And, although the case isn’t perfectly square, and the leads are more than a bit tangled, I’m pleased with the little noise maker that I now have at my disposal. In the next entry I’ll illustrate the sequence of events that took place in building this device. Oh yeah… and sounds.

Music for People on Shelves

Posted on December 10, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

people_on_shelves I’ve just rendered my full eighty-six minute Ostraka set from last night’s event at the West Bank Social Center. So, while waiting for the delightful documentation that Andrea Streudel is sure to produce, here’s a short segment of audio from the set.

I used Ableton Live to produce in real-time and my wavetable glitch machine Max patch to make most of the noises, which I routed into Live using Soundflower.

The projection work of the evening was top notch. An entire wall of the building across from the WBSC was covered with animated silhouettes of attendees on simulated three dimensional “shelves”.

Here’s the excerpt. I’m also including a link to the entire eighty-six minute set that I uploaded to soundcloud.com for all the brave people who’d like to hear the full set.

Excerpt from Music for People on Shelves

Physically Modeling Multitouch Controls

Posted on October 19, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

For the last two weeks I have been working on a performance application that I’m developing in MaxMSP controlled with TouchOSC on the iPhone or iPod Touch. The application is coming along quite well. I have the granular traversal piece working how I want, as I described in Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis.

Now I’m working on another feature of the application designed to allow the user to play samples with a rotary dial; not unlike manually spinning a record on a turntable. The basics of getting this going were pretty simple, but I also wanted to be able to spin the dial and have it continue to rotate based on the acceleration applied. Secondly, I wanted to have a slider that would adjust the amount of friction, from frictionless to instant braking.

This essentially involved physically modeling the control to behave like a turntable or other spinning device. After trying four or five techniques using standard Max objects I managed to get it working, but it wasn’t pretty. Instead I decided to try using a few lines of Javascript to do the calculations and adjust the position of the dial. This worked much better and only required about 35 lines of code. The best way to illustrate this application will be with video. I’ll shoot a few minutes to get the point across and share it here soon. For now here’s a recording made with the modeled controller I described and just a small amount of friction.

Percussion Loop Spinning

iPod Touch Audio Glitch

Posted on July 18, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

touch_waveform Lately I’ve been experimenting with iPod Touch applications for recording sound. Generally it’s necessary to use a headset to make a recording, but my goal is to figure out a practical way to bypass the headset with an input for a high quality microphone. While unsuccessfully testing my Audio Technica AT822 stereo mic as an input for the iPod Touch I captured an interesting glitch within the application I was testing.

The low frequency waveform (shown in the image at the left) played at regular intervals while I had the microphone attached. Perhaps it’s some sort of communication protocol for headset controls. I removed the DC offset, but otherwise left it as it was. Perhaps I’ll try playing it back at some higher frequencies to see it’s useful for anything musically.

iPod Touch Glitch

Warning: Unpleasant Audio of Sound Card Glitch

Posted on July 17, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

m-audio After upgrading my G4 to Safari 4.0.2 today, my M-Audio 2496 PCI bus internal sound card started making this horrible sound anytime audio was played on it. My first instinct was to capture the sound so I plugged a cable into my laptop and grabbed a few seconds of it in Audacity. Listen at your own risk. It’s loud and unpleasant, but somehow fun and delightful (reminding me of someone I once dated in the past). Fortunately after reinstalling the drivers it started behaving properly again (unfortunately this technique doesn’t work on partners).