You can follow pentametron’s work in realtime at the twitter feed – @pentametron – or read the collected sonnets at pentametron.com, updated several times per hour.

RT @ginafbabey    Thanks for the love and Karma is a bitch.
RT @Lweeeeeezy    I try and find the good in everyone.
RT @ItsMe_Shay_P  Some females really get beside themselves
RT @6thRosePetals So super disappointed with myself.

RT @mordemmy      It doesn't really matter anymore.
RT @nisaeee       This drama motivated me a lot! 안구정화 짱!!
RT @jayylyrics    she always gotta ruin something good
RT @Teeyaanur     wow gonna do the #lin tonight again..

RT @TerrySupplyCo I really wanna skate a empty pool.
RT @J18mcevoy     I wanna see the hunger games tonight
RT @IamJabariJ    I'M SO EXCITED FOR THE HUNGER GAMES!
RT @valerieward95 Wait, does The Hunger Games premiere tonight?

RT @_SyMoan       Not Even Gonna Entertain The Thought
RT @breeannie     Last practice of the season. #bittersweet

This isn’t my first effort at crowd-sourcing sonnets through the internet: I organized the Exquisite Sonnet Project almost 20 years ago (!) and did a similar project through twitter for the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2009. But this is the first one that’s entirely automated — and in which the contributors don’t even know they’re participating.

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.

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.)

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.

Ingredients:
Arduino from the junkbox
Ken Shirriff’s IR Remote Library for Arduino
Sparkfun IR Receiver and MIDI Shield
Antique MT-32 Synthesizer

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.

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.

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.

You don’t need to open the toy’s case, solder, or cut anything for circuit starving. Make a sandwich with a piece of paper between two scraps of aluminum foil attached to the leads of the potentiometer. Insert it between one of the batteries and its spring contact, and the potentiometer becomes part of the power circuit. Then you can tweak the pot, in very tiny increments, until the weirdness happens.

I’ve been wanting to try this since I met Cracked Ray Tube at the Guthman Competition last week. All the sounds come from internal noise and feedback in the mixer, with a bit of tweaking from the onboard effects.

The tromba marina is fingered below the bow, creating harmonics by lightly touching the string at the nodes. (I tied little bits of thread at the nodal points to make it easier for me to find them.) The bridge is unbalanced so that it vibrates and rattles against the body, making a buzzing sound. It’s an amazingly weird instrument. I love it, but I can’t really play it.

(Here’s a youtube video of a performance with a real Tromba Marina.)

Download the files to make your own here: www.thingiverse.com/thing:17385

The Music Box: Winter from TungstenMonkey on Vimeo.

Here’s a beautiful video from the Music Box in New Orleans, documenting the rehearsals and performances in November and December. I was just one of many artists and musicians who put the whole thing together.

Speak and Play! is a speech synthesizer for pianists. It has two parts: a score generator that turns written English text into musical scores, and a sample set (hurriedly constructed from my own voice) which, when used to play the scores, approximately recreates the original text.

Thanks to pianist Margaret Leng Tan for making Speak and Play! speak and play, and for coming up with the name!

More details below…

The synthesizer is a soundfont made in a hurry from samples of my own voice, and the score generator uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary to guess the pronunciation of written texts, and Lilypond to engrave the score. It took a few hours and a chicken parmigiana sandwich to get it working. It’s not ready for the public yet, but if you’d like to try it, get in touch.

I counted the number of uses of each phoneme in the dictionary’s 133,000 or so words with 850,000 phonemes, so I could put the most popular sounds close together to reduce the amount of octave hopping. Here’s the top ten phonemes in English:

AH 70922 8%
N 60394 7%
IH 49759 5%
S 49639 5%
L 49333 5%
T 48459 5%
R 45884 5%
K 42471 4%
IY 34461 4%
D 32352 3%


Here’s the score for “Hello! We love toy pianos!” as used in the video:

Once you have an instrument that plays your own voice, you can mess around with it like this:

(link)

a slide whistle made from some scraps of acrylic tube and rod, and lubricated with olive oil.

They have a nice deep tone with a lot of promise, so I hope to work with this technique more. I used this reference while building them.

I didn’t manage to record any video, so the demo video is pretty bland.

I designed some panflute-like whistles and printed them on a Makerbot. They’re disappointing – hard to play, and pathetic sounds. But you can download the design files and improve them for me! www.thingiverse.com/thing:17020 and www.thingiverse.com/thing:17023

The tiny sounds of a burning match.

Here’s a video with highlights from several years of noisy noises:

28 noisy noises from ranjit on Vimeo.

In a week or so I’ll be going back to New Orleans to see a performance at the sound sculpture shantytown I worked on in September. The New Orleans Airlift brought a bunch of artists to build a little village of musical instruments out of the wreckage of an 18th century house, and invited local musicians to perform with/on/in them! There’s a teaser video from the first performance — you can hear & see my piece, a set of amplified squeaky floorboards, providing the bass line starting at about 1:22. The project was covered in the New York Times last week, and you can read all about it at dithyrambalina.com. Next week will be my first chance to hear and see the completed shantytown!

In October I set up a show of my greenmarket scanography images at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library at Grand Army Plaza, along with two amazing photographers in the (Un)Still Life exhibit. There’s just one week left before the show comes down after this weekend, so please visit if you’re in Brooklyn. I had some of my images printed huge for the first time – more than 5 feet tall for one of them! And I had fun putting together a grid of almost 200 little tiny prints – check out the installation timelapse. By the way, all the prints are for sale, and a portion goes to benefit the library.

…and then I went to Europe, to talk about my work at VU Amsterdam’s lecture series with the Metamatic Research Initiative, and to show a piece I made for Artbots in Gent, Belgium. I haven’t really had time to collect my thoughts – or my photos – since I got back, but you can see a recording of my talk at metamaticresearch.info, and I have a silly video demonstrating the Voice Extruder, an installation which translates visitors’ voices into little sculptures, which are immediately fabricated for the visitor to take home. The Voice Extruder is an offshoot of my work for Metamatic, about which I’ll have much more to say soon! The day after I got back from Europe, I took the Voice Extruder to Baltimore for the Exploratorium’s Tinkerers’ Ball.

And what are you up to? Keep in touch!

* shantytown photo by Mellissa Strkyer — see lots more photos from the New Orleans project at the dithyrambalina blog.

A Symphony of Floorboards, Pipes and Stairs
(My nightingale floors made it into the title! Whoo!)

“You’re going to have a house, and the house makes music. When you get here, you’ll figure it out.”

That is more or less accurate, as far as it goes, though it clearly falls short as a practical description. “The Music Box,” the project of which this tower is a part, is one of those things that requires a hyphen or a compound word to describe; Delaney Martin, its curator, calls it “a shantytown-sound laboratory.”

In more literal terms, it is a collection of tumbledown wooden and metal structures built on the site, and almost entirely from the remains of a late-18th-century Creole cottage that collapsed a couple of years ago here in the historic, bohemian Bywater neighborhood.

Each structure houses an instrument, or two or three. In some cases the structures are musical instruments themselves. There is the thatched-roof hut that is home to an elaborate arrangement of Balinese vibraphones, the shack with amplified floorboards, the rusty spiral staircase that is also a foot-operated pipe organ and the little glass house containing what looks like a giant, bell-lined hoop skirt. They are all clustered together on the narrow lot, like the stage set of a fairy tale that takes place in a junkyard.

Be sure to check out the slide show.

There’s also a brief video about the first performance. (You can hear my floorboards starting at 1:22 or so)

The Music Box – Oct 22 from TungstenMonkey on Vimeo.

Video: Adam Mayer helps test an almost-finished version of my project for Artbots Gent: the Voice Extruder makes a shape from your voice, and then prints it out for you on a 3d printer.

Many of the fruits and vegetables I use in my images came from the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, just a few steps from the library, so it’s especially nice to see them in the beautiful lobby gallery there.

More information at brooklynpubliclibrary.org

Some guy checks out the biggest print moments after we hung it

Timelapse: installing almost 200 tiny prints covering 9 years of veggie scanography

In September, I’ll be making a wave-powered sound sculpture for the Dumbo Arts Festival (September 23-25). Also showing a bunch of big prints from my produce scan series in the show “(Un)Still Life” at the lobby gallery at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch (September-December). And going to New Orleans to install a sound sculpture in Swoon’s musical house project (opening October 15th). Hopefully I’ll have time for Maker Faire in there somewhere (September 17-18). And I’ll be sending good vibes (and probably laser whistles) to the Festival of Music for People and Thingamajigs in the Bay Area (September 22-25). Then in October, I’ll be going to the Netherlands to speak at VU University Amsterdam and to show a piece at Artbots Gent (October 7-9), and in December, I’ll have a couple of pieces and maybe an installation in Phyllis Chen’s Uncaged Toy Piano Festival in NYC.

So now I’d better get some rest.

That same weekend, I took some of my homemade instruments, including the 8-bit violin and a second JelTone (built in haste at the last possible minute), to the Solid Sound Music Festival for the CDM/Moog Handmade Lounge. After all my jello melted, on the second day of the festival I rebuilt the JelTone with fruit salad instead, and here it is:

I was lucky to be chosen as one of the Queens Museum of Art‘s sound art residents this month, so I’ve been working with my collection of vintage automatic music toys, and I’ll give a presentation/performance this Saturday (June 18th) at 5pm. The performance is free, but come early and check out the rest of the museum, including the famous Panorama of the City of New York! Event into: facebook.com/event.php?eid=229965507015603

Here’s the toy collection:

The following weekend, I’ll be at the Solid Sound Festival at Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA) as part of Peter Kirn’s Handmade Music Lounge: solidsoundfestival.com/exhibits

Coming up in July: a workshop at the Peabody Essex Museum near Boston, the Sketching in Hardware conference in Philadelphia, and a field trip to the Lightning Field in New Mexico!

What are you up to?

Thanks, CTP, for the videos.

Plans and instructions for the 8-bit violin are now on thingiverse!
thingiverse.com/thing:6912

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous