Scrapyard Challenge Junk Run – Reading Reflections

Hey everyone, so today I’m going to be talking a little bit about my junk run this week to gather materials for our 1 day workshop. My challenge was to find some useful old junk that nobody wanted for use of my project creation. I was rummaging through some of the old junk in my folks place & ran across a bunch of old computer parts no longer in use. I was pretty happy not to go through the lengths of digging through my neighbor’s stinky garbage outside or even worst to go to a junkyard & pay for old pieces of scrap. I was fortunate enough to find an old processor, a motherboard, a power supply with wires, some old speakers, some memory sticks & a heat sink fan. I don’t know if I can get any of this stuff to function but it would be kind of cool if I could especially with no background in building electronic gadgets. So let’s just see what happens…

Reading Reflections – MIDI Scrapyard Challenge

This week I’m going to be talking a little bit about the” MIDI Scrapyard Challenge Workshops” excerpt by Katherine Moriwaki. What it is, is a 1 day seminar where as the contributor fabricates musical interactive control modules from junk electronics found. It basically summarizes what the workshop experience is about in relation to the principles, the experience of the participants as well as example projects. At the end of the workshop, all projects are rounded up & each participant is given the chance to explain to everyone what the controller does, how it was created & to give a demo of it. Everyone was working with these constraints which are: Limited time, random materials & all projects must have a simple input/output. The MSC was inspired by the do-it-yourself community as well as the hacker community. 80 shows such as McGyver & the A-Team feature resourceful main characters who embody these principles.

Reading Reflections – Circuit Bending Build Your Own Alien Instruments

Hey, so today I’m going to be talking a little bit about Circuit Bending Build Your Own Alien Instruments by Qubais Reed Ghazala. Basically it starts off talking about bending the headspace of electronic design. What this means is experimental electronic instrument design. Ghazala states that circuit bending is not as daunting a task as it used to be, that circuit bending no longer requires the users to have in-depth knowledge to begin to circuit bend. He makes the comparison between earlier painters & that they had to understand the science of creating the pigments for their paint as well as creating the gesso & prepare the canvas before the first stoke of paint even touched the canvas. In contrast to today where premade paint & pre-stretched canvases are readily available to anyone. Basically he is saying that circuit bending today is much the same with many of the key elements readily available to anyone. Simple things such as coconuts can be used as a basis for an electronic drum with some light modifications involving steel strings & magnets. Early musical hits such as the the Beach Boy’s hit “Good Vibrations” set the stage early on for the popularization of electronic music instruments. The use of a Electro-Theremin” which is a mechanically controlled oscillator was used in this hit song. Ghazala also spoke of the EMI – Experimental Musical Instruments Magazine in which the phrase circuit bending was originally coined. He says the field is wide open to artists for new exploration of different mediums.