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

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Scanning a handheld magnetic pickup back and forth over the piano strings makes a pretty neat sound.  I may try attaching a rail on which the pickup can slide back and forth.

The pickup is plugged into an ordinary guitar amp.

Plug: Fun with Sensors workshop this Saturday at NYC Resistor!

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I’ve always thought the patterns on corncobs looked like player piano rolls.  So I wrote a program that watches a slowly-turning corncob. Whenever a particularly dark kernel crosses the centerline of the image, it plays a note corresponding to the height.

You can download the Processing code from moonmilk.com/11/02/cornscan.txt.

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On the way to SHARE last night, I
packed a contact microphone and drumsticks but no instrument, telling
myself I’d find something in the garbage on the way there. What I
found was this nice metal garbage can lid.

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These are some of the whistles made by participants in this afternoon’s laser whistle workshop at NYC Resistor.

There’s still two workshops left in the noisy noise series!

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Practice for Saturday’s laser whistle workshop.  It’s cut from 1/4″ poplar.  I won’t post the cutting plan until I figure out why only one of its two whistles is hooting and fix the problem!

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The simplest possible midi instrument: just jam the speaker cable into the midi out connector.

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NYCResistor rescued a battered old upright piano that was destined for
the dumpster. There were 6 missing hammers right in the middle, so I
made a quick and dirty set of replacements. Surprisingly, they have a
sound that’s pretty close to the original hammers.

The hammers are lasercut from 1/4" poplar, glued together in
pairs to be 1/2" thick and then sanded down to 0.4" to match
the original hammers. The extended slot in the bottom allows me to
glue the hammer onto the old broken shafts instead of replacing them,
and to tilt them to the right to hit the strings at the right angle.
The felt is some wool stuff from a craft drawer. Real hammer heads
are mostly felt, but I made these ones mostly wood because it was
easier.

Plans and instructions at www.thingiverse.com/thing:6242

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I’ve always loved the sounds made by makerbots as they print out
little plastic gewgaws. Tonight I miked up Jeff’s custom crystal
Thing-o-matic as it printed out a shot glass. Acoustic mic is panned
left, and contact mic is panned right.

I know people have programmed their makerbots to play music, but I
like best the sounds they naturally make when they make objects.

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This humidifier runs next to my bed all night in the winter.
Sometimes its groans and whirs are so interesting that they keep me
awake and I have to turn it off. It plays little cadences, drones,
and repeating beats that constantly change. Or I’m just hallucinating
in my half-asleep state.

I’ve been meaning to record it for months. It didn’t do anything
particularly exciting during these 45 seconds, but you can hear it
subtly change even in that time.

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An improvised ocarina design, laser-cut and assembled from
cross-sections. It’s much less ergonomic but easier to assemble than
last year’s laser ocarina.

Plans and instructions are on thingiverse: www.thingiverse.com/thing:6182

p.s. I’m teaching a laser whistle workshop this Saturday in Brooklyn!

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CAUTION: LOUD AND UNPLEASANT NOISE!

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Materials: drumsticks, wooden dowels, wood glue.

Plus a bonus sound for today–crunching through snow with a crispy crust of ice:

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For all four years of the instrument-a-day project, my noisy
refrigerator has plagued me: I have to unplug it whenever I record a
new instrument at home.  Well, today I exploited it.

Materials: refrigerator noise, filtered by resonant tin cans.

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Found wood, guitar strings, zither pins, scrap acrylic bridges, and a weird overhead pickup made of crudely-wound wire and a magnet out of a dead hard drive.

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Artistic Mediums II

Coming up later in February:
Laser Whistles – Saturday, February 12, from 1-4 PM
Learn how to use the laser cutter by making wooden whistles, recorders, or ocarinas.
Fun with Sensors – Saturday, February 19, from 1-3 PM
Assemble vibration, light, and magnetic sensors and use them to pick up hidden sounds from the environment and to hear objects and musical instruments in a new way.
Handmade Electronic Noise – Saturday, February 26, from 1-4 PM
Make simple synthesizers and sequencers from dirt-cheap integrated circuits.

I’m still scanning my greenmarket veggies every week. See them all (four hundred and eighty one so far) in the flickr set.

With flaming, melting instruments: Saturday November 6, after 6pm, at Flux Factory’s Self-Destructing Art Show – Flux Factory, 39-31 29th St in Long Island City.

(Corrected!! Self-Destructing Art Show opens Saturday 11/6, not Friday 11/5.)

(Also! duYun is taking some of my homemade instruments to Shanghai to perform at the Rockbund Art Museum, opening her collaboration with Shahzia Sikander!)

Playing around with the ebassoon, which uses a simple network of dividers to derive a just-intonation scale from a single master tone.