Category: 21st Century Studio Practise

During year one we learnt some basic soldering when we made our contact microphones, this was my first time soldering and was a good way to introduce me to the world of D.I.Y electronics. Now a year later we are soldering more convoluted devices. I will be talking about my soldering for the Space Invader synthesiser. I did not finish building the synthesiser, but the experience of soldering was what I was really seeking.

Soldering this synthesiser proved a difficult task, there are a lot of tiny components that are used and using a small board to solder on proved a challenge for me at first. The week prior we had a lesson where we practised soldering onto circuits to work on our soldering skills, this was very helpful because if not for that lesson this would have failed very early. Luckily thanks to my great classmates and tutor who gave me help when I needed it during that session, I came into the space invader session confident. This session was my first time soldering to this level, cutting my own wires and trimming them, and fetching the resources myself and checking if they are correct.

In the picture above you can see my soldering efforts, the switch on the right with the component soldered on was the first thing we did. I found this to be the most difficult part of the class as figuring out how to solder the very thin arm of the component to the other component was very difficult. I was then shown that if you use blu tac it can hold whatever you need in place, which made everything else I did throughout that session a breeze.

All I ended up being able to do in the session was to solder these compactors and do all the preparation that I mentioned earlier, even though I did not get a synthesiser at the end of the session. The knowledge of how to solder, do all the preparation and follow instructions was very valuable to me.

Previous to this lecture I had little knowledge on D.I.Y electronics, but it has been something that has always piqued my interest as it would be a great skill to have so I can apply it to my work as an artist. In this lecture, we were given a 9v battery, crocodile clips, breadboards, and loudspeakers. I will focus on my work with the loudspeakers. We were given loudspeakers in numerous sizes which affects the sound when manipulated with 2 paperclips placed on top of the loudspeaker. Here is a clip below of my classmate Rysia Kaczmar creating some speaker noise.

If you manage to get the paperclips positioned correctly the speaker will start playing harsh feedback sounds to you which can be changed by moving the paperclips. You can also change the sound by putting materials on top of the speaker e.g. sand. As an artist that works heavily in noise, I found this fascinating and something I am very keen to do in the future. This could be used in a live improvisational set-up. Since if you use different size loudspeakers you get different tones and feedback, if you used different speakers in performance it could be very interesting, especially if mic’d up to an fx unit, turning this into a musique concrete, noise performance.

In our lecture, we learnt about Pure Data (often referred to as PD) and how to use it. PD is an open-source piece of software that can be used in multiple ways, from recording and generating sound to controlling lighting rigs, and animation. There are different versions of pure data with varying user-friendliness. There are five ‘main flavours’ of PD, vanilla, ceammc, L2Ork, purr data, and plug data. These all do something unique and your personal choice will vary on what you need and how well you know PD. I have only used vanilla as it is the most simple for beginners.

We learnt about how to build oscillators in PD, which showed me just how much you can do with the software. You can build as many oscillators as you want, and with enough research and dedication, you could build a whole synthesiser. Before this lecture, I didn’t know this was possible. We were also taught about how to use objects, which is what you use to build things in PD. We also learnt that the use of tilde (~) is very important to PD, for example, you cannot type the word dac (Digital to analog converter), it will not work if you do not use a tilde behind it, it should look like this: dac~.

While using PD I realised the number of possibilities it has, so when I went home I installed some premade PD patches to experiment with. I installed noise and drone generators and after playing with them, I decided to find out how it was made by looking at the specs of it. I found it hard to understand at first, but this is something I want to learn in the future.