Reed Ghazala - The Father of Circuit Bending

Even if you don't know what circuit bending is, you've definitely heard what it does. Although it's front and center in glitch, Avant-garde and noise music, elements of it can be heard in main stream genres too.

So what is circuit bending? The art of creatively rewiring, customizing, and shorting an electronic circuit. Usually it's tiny, low voltage electronics - guitar effects, children's toys etc. It's a really neat process, and something that tickles the experimenter in me!

Reed Ghazala is the acknowledged "father" of this practice. He might not be the first one to do it, but he's definitely the one to coin the term and spread it as a musical instrument. Here's a short documentary that's both informative and fascinating. Makes me want to go out and dig up all my half-dead electronics!

CD case/Circuit Board/Instrument

This is really neat...again, like many others like this, it is extremely gimmicky - but the gimmick is so cool that I would buy it.

Check it out - it's CD case that is also an instrument/circuit board that you can play!



While I suspect that this is expensive to make and difficult to create, I think it would be fairly easy to do a non-electric instrument - say, an integrated kazoo - and it would instantly add value to the fan.

Would you buy something like this, just because it's cool?

Shoes as an Instrument #2

Awhile ago, I posted a blog about a shoe that Nike made (purely for promotional purposes, not for production) - in which a set of shoes were fitted with MIDI triggers on the soles. That blog post his here.

Adidas has now come up with something very similar - but this time it's wireless and a little bit more collaborative. Check it out below!

A Piano that Speaks English

Everything from traffic noise, violins, to our own voices are changes in the way the air around us move. When they create a sound, they are creating a wave that oscillates at certain frequencies. In theory then, by analyzing these frequencies and wave patterns and reproducing them with different mediums, you can recreate the sound of anything from animals to instruments, to pretty much everything. This is the theory behind synthesizers - they "synthesize" the frequency and wave patterns of instruments like violins, and reproduce them through pre-programmed sin waves.

In theory then, you could reproduce the sound of say, a violin, with anything. That's right. You could make hitting lego blocks, clapping hands, even a car - to sound like a violin. Why? Because we are able to analyze the frequency of a violin and break it down to small components. If we have enough precise control over (lots of) lego blocks, then we could manipulate them enough such that hitting them would produce a similar frequency pattern as a violin. Sounds far fetched?

There's an interesting comparison that you're probably more familiar with - image mosaics. Or pictures that are made up of smaller pictures:

Not perfect, but it's clearly visible - and this next video is essentially the musical equivalent.

Created by Berno Polzer as a performance art piece "Wien Modern" is an installation for the World Venice Forum 2009.  Using a detailed analysis of a recital of the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court, "Wien Modern" uses a combination of piano keys to simulate the sound of a human child. Each piano key would be like the small pictures in the image above - and the human voice like the Mona Lisa.



I'd like to see other instruments do these sorts of things too!

*I've been busy recording my own music in the past couple months, so this blog has suffered. I'll try to get this going again ASAP, but thanks for your patience in the mean time.

Loop Around The House - An Adventure in Delay

This is really fun, although by the end it sounds completely crazy. But in order to really appreciate what's going on here, you have to understand the difference between looping and delaying an audio track.

Looping is where you record a sample, and then repeat it for as long as you want. It's the backbone of most hip hop and electronic music. In most cases, the sample is pre-recorded, even when it's played live. Some artists - most often beat boxers - record the sample live though, and then control the loop with a foot pedal. Other artists in different genres have also done this too, like KT Tunstall. In all of these cases, the loop is used as a backing track - so you're playing the whole thing yourself! Totally fun.

The difference between those tracks and the video I want to talk about today... is that this one is not using a foot pedal, or loops. It's using a long delay. A delay is more like an echo: have you ever been on top of a mountain, and yelled something really loud towards another mountain? When that happens, it echos everything back at you, with the delay time defined by the distance it takes the sound to travel. It it was sufficiently loud enough, the sound that echoes back will bounce back from the mountain you stand on, and repeat again and again...until it fades out. A delay effect is essentially doing the same thing: repeats the sound, but each time it repeats, it fades away a little bit. In short, there are two settings to a delay effect - the time it takes for the delay to repeat the signal (the distance between the mountains), and the number of times it repeats it until it completely fades away (how "loud" you're screaming at the mountains).

So when is the delay effect used? It's most often used on vocals and guitars, but with much, MUCH shorter delay times. The most famous examples would probably be earlier U2 songs like this one. In this song, the guitar is delayed the whole entire time. The Edge is actually playing about half of the notes you are hearing: the rest is the delayed notes. Notice that it sounds almost machine gun like, and it plays over itself while it chugs along at a really controlled pace. This is more or less the "typical" way of using the delay effect (back then this was really cutting edge though). The time it takes to return the signal is so short, that the return signal starts even before you've finished playing the original note.

Getting back to the actual video I want to show - this video uses a delay effect instead of a looping effect. It has the delay time set EXTREMELY long, with the time it takes to fade away at a maximum range. In other words, if you screw up, you can't just re-do it... you have to start over, because it will keep returning that signal back at you until you turn everything off, or until it fades away on it's own. But then again, if it was any other way this video wouldn't really work - you have to have the older sounds fade away at some point, unless you just want completely un-listenable cacophony.

Looping Around The House from Si on Vimeo.

Lego Sequencer

This is an instrument that blows my mind. I have no idea how this works!
It's a sequencer based on lego blocks. A sequencer is a software or hardware that triggers sounds in a controlled way, such that you can create beats and sounds. It's a vital part of electronic music. (for more on sequencers, go to the wikipedia page here.

What makes this one special is the way that the lego's ability to build on top of each other is utilized. To make this clearer, watch the video below of a more standard sequencer first:



As you can see, the balls are used to indicate when and what sounds are triggered. It's quite straight forward.

Now imagine balancing other balls on top of those balls... or balancing bigger balls that cross over different slots all at once.

The lego sequencer lets you do that... and is programmed to change sounds accordingly. I have NO clue what changes it makes when you build on top of other blocks, but it does something. Furthermore, the colours also make a difference in the sound as well.

It's like sequencing with another dimension! Blows my mind.



For more information on the artist/designer of this sequencer, check out Yoshi Akai's website here.

Shoes as an Instrument

...Or more specifically, a MIDI trigger.

Although this video is part of a Nike Ad, it's pretty interesting. If you've seen my previous post on modifying the guitar hero controller into an instrument, it's a similar concept. Instead of changing guitar hero buttons into a MIDI trigger, the shoes have been modified with sensors that respond to how they are bent.

Gimmicky - yes - but fun nonetheless. I'm slightly disappointed that they didn't use dancers wearing the shoes, but check it out!

Virtuoso Theramin Playing

The theramin is one of the coolest instruments around, but I find that most people associate it with bad playing, or eerie sounds without real melodies. This is because there are very few true theramin players, and for good reason: it's one of the hardest instruments to play. (If you don't know what a theramin is, check out the wikipedia entry here. It's neat that it got used extensively in psychedelic music and such, but little do people know that it had a classical heritage - it was originally an instrument to play classical music!

So here's a few great theramin players: Randy George, who is a modern virtuoso, and Clara Rockmore, one of the original players of the instrument. You'll be completely surprised if you're used to thinking of the theremin as a soundtrack/psychedelic noise maker. It's really interesting how expressive it can be.

Here is Randy George playing "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley:


Here's Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns:

Techno Jeep

This is a fun piece, where all the sounds are made from sounds that a car can make. Although there has been other pieces made out of cars/car parts, this one is in one take, with no edits! I have to admit, the first 40secs or so of the piece wasn't all that impressive....but wait until it kicks in. It'll surprise you.

Julian Smith - the one who composed this - talks about how he first had the inspiration when he heard the seats on the jeep make a weird noise. It's that kind of recognition/creativity that's really needed to make music, and I totally admire people who can "hear" musical potentials in everyday life.

The first video is the original vid. The second is a "making of" video, as well as the actual video. ....um, ya, I guess I could just post the second video, but whatever.

Techno Jeep, by Julian Smith:

Screaming Dance Music

It's funny how life works. A couple of posts ago I talked about the art of screaming, and now I come across this...

I have to admit I wouldn't actually listen to this on my leisure time, but it's certainly an original idea. I'm sure it fills a niche that never existed before!

What am I talking about? Ever wonder what would happen if dance music incorporated death metal screaming? Me neither. But someone did, and here's the result. Whatever you think of it, I think we can all agree it's worth listening to once, because this is definitely different:



I checked out their other videos, but they seem to be more of a rap group than a dance group. Screaming and rap didn't surprise me as much, so I posted this video instead. If you like it, they are called brokeNCYDE.