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The traditional way to start an instrument-a-day month: with a whistle.
instrument-a-day returns! day 1: wooden whistle
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Category Archives: sound sculpture
Still Space at Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center
My new sound installation Still Space (video) opened Friday September 14th at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was commissioned for the Asian American Arts Alliance’s Locating the Sacred Festival.
Still Space is part of the festival exhibition The Space Within. You can see it daily between 3:30 and 7pm until Sunday, September 23.
Update: Steven Speliotis made this nice video of the installation: vimeo.com/49657504
instrument-a-day 29: rainy day monitor
I stuck contact mics onto a bunch of different plates and vessels and put them out on the rain. I like this sound so much that I’m tempted to make a permanent installation that I can plug in whenever it rains. Inspired by Quintron’s Singing House, which I spent a lot of time listening to last year.
This is the last day of Instrument-a-day 2012. Thanks for following along! I’ll be giving a talk about the project at Dorkbot NYC next Wednesday, March 7th, and performing with Andrea Williams, Dan Joseph, and the Glass Bees in Brooklyn on Saturday the 10th.
instrument-a-day 28: wind up time code
Turning the click-clack of an old wind up motor into MIDI time code to control the playback of a recording. (I’ll try it on with a video next!)
(Inside the box, the wind up motor has a flapping arm that interrupts a light beam. Each clack of the motor generates a MIDI SPP command which tells the computer how far / fast to move through the recording.)
instrument-a-day 27: remote control
That harpsichord bit at the beginning kind of sounds like Dead Can Dance, no?
An IR decoder plugged into an Arduino intercepts codes transmitted by remote controls. Simple software uses the manufacturer code to choose a MIDI channel, and the button code to choose a note. It plays a single percussive note for remote codes it can’t understand, like the Bose.
That synthesizer is 25 years old, and the NAD remote control probably almost the same.
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instrument-a-day 26: optical siren
A perforated disk glued to an old cassette player motor interrupts ambient light and makes tones on a tiny optical diode connected to an amplifier.
instrument-a-day 25: thimbelon
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Just some metal thimbles in a row.
instrument-a-day 24: unpleasant reed pipe
A friend gave me an old mouthpiece (I think it’s from an alto saxophone). I made an adapter to attach it to the pipe from yesterday’s PVC membrane pipe.
You can download the design files for the adapter from www.thingiverse.com/thing:18089
This is way harder to play than the membrane pipe! It took all my breath to get a few honks out of it.
instrument-a-day 23: membrane pipe
I think the membrane pipe is a relatively recent invention. I’m not sure who came up with it, but there’s a lot of nice examples on youtube. Here’s a how-to video. I should have watched that video before making this thing, which is my first attempt at a membrane pipe.
I didn’t make any effort to tune it – I just drilled holes approximately where my fingers could reach, and that not very accurately. You can see my hands straining in the video.
instrument-a-day 22: prototype for a shaftless toy piano keyboard
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I have the chimes from a toy piano, but no keyboard. This is a sketch of an idea for an all wood keyboard where the keys and hammers rotate on integral fulcrums rather than on a metal shaft.