Category: Expanded Studio Practice for 21st Century Sound Artists

Putting together the Gravity Bender was probably the most difficult stage of the creation of my Drone Machine, I needed to make some soldering, glue the wood structure and screw the potentiometers and this was a hard task due to the reduced space inside the enclosure. First thing was soldering 3 cables to each potentiometer in order to plug them later to the Bread Board.

Finally, and after attaching the potentiometers carefully I connected the cabled and hold them with some tape, the Bela Board and the Bread Boards stayed in the base of the instrument. My Drone device was ready to finish the composition of Sound for Screen, I’m looking forward now to jam with this machine and other elements and record some of these composition. Creating this instrument was fun and I learnt different techniques along the process.

As I’ve shown slightly on the 3D Workshop post, the name for my Drone Machine device project is Gravity Bender. This idea of giving the instrument a name just came up when designing the front panel, an I thought that it would fit nicely within the design. The principles of synthesis used on this device, based on additive and AM synthesis, modulate the waves one to another and that makes me think on bending shapes or “bending the gravity”, therefore my choice of this name for my creation.

The idea of creating an instrument from scratch really fascinated me as a possible project for the unit Expanded Studio Practice for 21st Century Sound Artists, and I also thought that it would be a good idea to use the instrument to compose some sounds for film score, in order to combine my assignment with the Sound for Screen unit as well.

The Bela Board was the perfect tool to carry this task and, as shown before, I had the Pure Data patch that I wanted to use for the Drone Machine, the enclosure designed at the 3D Workshop and the electronic components needed for the construction, so I was ready to build it. After some research, I managed to adapt my original PD patch to the Bela Board requirement and the patch looked like this:

Then, I started to connect some jumpers to the Bread Boards and attached the potentiometer, having created the first prototype for the Gravity Bender.

And it sounded like this:

The Bela board is the main platform for study on this unit, this is the hardware that will translate our Pure Data patches ideas into reality, and it will implement these interactive audio applications into hardware devices. Bela is and open-form embedded computing platform which supports C++, Pure Data, Super Solider and Csound code in order to work. It was created by the Augmented Instruments Lab at Queen Mary Univeristy of London.

This device is equipped with customisable 16 digital in/out, 8 analog in/out and Audio input and output. In this case we’ll be using the Bela Mini, a new simplified version, with a smaller design and easier to implement within our projects. Bela Board can control sensors, lights and leds and a wide range of electronic applications.

For my Drone Machine project with the 21st Century Studio Practice unit, I had to visit the 3D Workshop at LCC in order to make a wood enclosure for my device. This wood case consist on a wooden box which will be closed on a “puzzle style” cutting; and this needs to be done with a Laser Cutter. There are many designs online in terms of wooden boxes for laser cutting, but finally I found a website called MakerCase where you can make your custom design which will fit within your preferences.

The rest of the design has to be done on Adobe Illustrator, and lately this archive will be opened on the cutting machine’s own software (Ruby) where it will be finally cut. These archive have to saved on RGB colour, and this is because the different colours will perform different actions inside the laser cutter; for example blue for external cut, red for internal cut, and black for engraving. This was my final design seen from AI.

Then I just needed to book a slot at the 3D Workshop for the laser cutter and run the software. I also had to buy on the eStore from UAL and Plywood surface, from where I’ll be able to cut the pieces of my wood case. The files are then loaded in Ruby, and after setting up some preferences, the machine is ready to cut. The wood board also need to be settled with tape to the machine (Wood is a natural material and the surface could be a bit bent), I closed the top lid and the Laser cutter started the procedure. The 3D workshop was a really good experience that I’d definitely recommend, the stuff was always helpful and training was provided.

For “Procedural Audio” we understand the sound design or sound effects which are completely synthesised by a computer, rather than using real recordings and samples.

Exercise:

Recreate a Pedestrian Crossing Signal

Recreate fire

In this second week a the Expanded Studio Practice unit we’ve started using the audio programming visual language called Pure Data. This is a popular software, intuitive to use, and it’s also free of charge; for those reasons is the selected coding application for this unit.

In this first lesson we have been building the most common waves oscillators; sine, sawtooth, square and pulse width. Here is a screenshot with the final layout of the first exercise performed in class.

Personal Creative Praxis

• Build each of the synthesis techniques and explore other possibilties (e.g. wavetable synthesis)
• Build the 4 stage sequencer

Here I’m going to add some pictures and videos of the patches that I’ve been creating on my first experiments with Pure Data

Different Oscillators

4 Stage Sequencer

Possible Drone Machine

This patch could be later converted into my device for this unit, a Drone Machine. It features two configurable oscillators; and additive sinters oscillator and an AM oscillator. It also includes a filter and various volume control per oscillator and also a master volume, here I’m attaching a demo of its functioning.

Organise / Think / Plan / Explore This unit offers you plenty of scope to expand upon your existing sonic praxis. Reflect upon what that is for you right now. 

Where are you going with your creative work? What are your motivations? What are you excited about? Is there anything that worries you? What regular (daily) action can you take to move forward? Our habits define us.

After reviewing some sounds machines in class like the electric guitar, an arp, a noise box and some other things I was really interested by a homemade synth on a wooden box and I thought that I could create a drone machine with this kind of enclosure. This is a project that I always wanted to recreate and I’ve done similar things in the past so I think that will be manageable for me to create this device.

Brainstorm

Here I found some images of how more or less I’d like the device to be. About the the internal functioning I’m still a bit dubious whether to make it an analog machine or maybe something based on Pure Data or the Bela platform. But I really enjoyed the wooden box as well so I think that the case will look like that.

Youtube Inspo

These are some examples, found on Youtube, of what could look like the device I’m looking for.

On this first class on the unit Expanded Studio Practice for 21st Century Sound Artist, we’ve been experimenting with a kind of “noise machine” which consists on a speaker drive connected to a 9v battery. The battery polarity make the speaker to move forward or backwards depending on the voltage orientation and connected with alligator clips we can activate the circuit every time we put together the two ends of the wires.

Then we have found other elements like clips, screws, chains and other metallic or plastics noisy objects around the studio and tried different setups around the screen of the speaker. When activating the circuit repeatedly these objects kind of “jump” in various directions making a wide variety of noises and also creating a feedback where the whole system shakes and can’t stop activating the circuit by itself again and again. Definitely a very special technique and an interesting experiment.