A block of accordion reeds from a long-ago impulse purchase on ebay, and a vacuum cleaner.
Author Archives: ranjit
instrument-a-day 1: joe strummer
Instrument-a-day is back! This is my ninth year of making a new musical instrument (loosely defined) every day in February.
An easy one for day one: I tied a piece of fishing line to a battery-powered cappuccino frother to make a strumming machine.
bloomsday at moonmilk
For Bloomsday I made a little web machine which reads out random lines of dialog from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Leave it running all day.
It’s random but global, so everyone listening will hear the same texts at the same time.
(It seems to work best in OSX Safari, where it can find an Irish accent. In Chrome it sometimes freezes up.)
And some text-twisting, looking for accidental pentameter and accidental acronyms in the text of Ulysses:
I am another now and yet the same.
About a million barrels all the same.
He cried above the clatter of the wheels:
My boots were creaking I remember now.The carriage galloped round a corner: stopped.
She was entitled to her widow’s dower
Think you’re the only pebble on the beach?
All that Italian florid music is.Door of the stables near Cecilia street.
She had a gorgeous, simply gorgeous, time.
It was exactly seventeen o’clock.
Four winners yesterday and three today.(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts.
says is the book sensation of the year.
LYNCH: (Lifting Kitty from the table) Come!
Yet I’ve a sort a Yorkshire relish for…
instrument-a-day 25: wooden synth, special wfmu edition
You may be able to own this machine if you give money to WFMU during their fundraising marathon next month!
pentametron at boston cyberarts
My sonnetbot pentametron is in an exhibition at Boston Cyberarts, along with work by Sara Schnadt, Robert B. LISEK, Caleb Larsen, Darius Kazemi, and Cory Arcangel. The opening reception is tonight!
Here’s a mockup of the pentametron installation, with a live twitter feed and four mutating sonnets drawing from pentametron’s database.
instrument-a-day 24: vegan egg bass
Alida made an egg carton bass and I wanted to steal the idea but I didn’t have any eggs, so I used a box of tofu.
instrument-a-day 23: tiny fizz
baking soda and vinegar on a contact microphone
instrument-a-day 22: lucky cat fight
instrument-a-day 21: khionophone
instrument-a-day 20: window wiper
Wiping an amplified window.