Both band members are multi-instrumentalists – which is a fancy way of saying we’ll mess around with any instrument you put in front of us – but for the most part Holly sings and Frederick plays drums. In the studio we take full advantage of digital sound production techniques, but we hope to keep the live show rough and ready.

Here’s our first track : Banana Beat

And here’s another : Mango Bango

We’ve been booked for our first gig! August 21st, 2010. At the ZooShop, with Vincent Parker and Bartel

I’ll be playing my speaker/drum, my home-made electro-acoustic drum synthesizer.

For those of you on facebook, here’s the facebook event.

This is one short clip from a session I did the other day. I’m working on editing a bunch of the footage together to use in a proposal for an upcoming festival.

This is rough, but I’m excited by how easy it was to make this much progress. I’m hoping to develop and refine this into a sound art installation which gives control of the pitch and velocity of the sound to the participant/viewer.

This is how I hobbled this experiment together. I used my speaker/drum setup, which emits sound within a drum. I put some water in an extra drum skin, and sealed another skin on top to make a kind of drumskin sandwich. The drumskin sandwich becomes a kind of petri dish for the water. Place it on the speaker/drum et voila! L’alchimie!

I think this would be much more effective if I put a light source directly into the drum, but this is prototype action! That’s right. So I used this image projector for tracing that I had handy. Now that I know the basic premise works I’m going to see if I can find an opportunity to build this nice for an event or installation.

Last night Audiovox debuted at the opening for the Surge Festival of Urban Digital Culture as part of the StoryBox project.

Audiovox is a multichannel interactive audio installation. Speakers are arranged throughout the space such that on first approach a dissonant melange of sounds is heard. Moving through the speaker array towards the focal point of the piece, the soundscape becomes more and more harmonious. At the center, where the sound is the most harmonious, visitors can explore and affect the soundscape via a patchbay-like interface.

The patchbay interface consists of 11 headphone jacks, a dangling connection cable, and it’s own speaker system. Visitors can plug their own headphones directly into the jacks, or patch a signal through to the speaker, which projects down from overhead. Each of the patches outputs a different recording of stories recorded at the recent Vancouver Storytelling Festival, and while the experience of those stories are themselves the true focal point of the piece, the patchbay is the interface which enables that experience. As such, we felt that its form was going to be crucially important to the overall aesthetic of the piece. The image of a book seemed to be the perfect metaphor – after all it is a “literal” story box – so we decided to build our patchbay into a book. We originally explored the idea of modifying an actual book for this purpose, but some early prototypes taught us that this wasn’t likely to be practical. We decided instead to build a book from scratch.

The sounds used in the Audiovox piece were sourced from both the Storytelling Festival and from workshops held with the StoryBox project participants. The material was absolutely beautiful to work with. Collaborating with Rup to arrange this material into a multichannel composition was a magical process, full of serendipity. Most the pieces just fell together perfectly, seemingly with a will of their own.

The piece really has to be experienced first-hand, so please visit the gallery while the show is up:
Audiovox will be showing until August 28, 2010 at the W2 gallery, 151 W. Cordova, Vancouver, B.C.

We’ve been collecting parts for a while now, but recently we actually got started building the thing.

Check out Niklas’s perspective on his blog.

This past weekend I was lucky to contribute 3 interactive sound-art pieces to the Western Front’s “Sonic Playground”. This is my second time taking part in this event, and both times it has been both an excellent learning experience and a real motivation to further develop my sound art work.

Click here for more info about Sonic Playground on the Western Front website.

and here

Check out this video of the Drumtron 46000 in action.

I think there’s a mysterious aspect to the work of design. Design involves the manipulation of image and symbol to effect change in the physical world, which to me sounds like pure magic. Magic was the theme of the exhibit, which explored the use of sound and music to create various effects in the films of Disney… and when it comes to manipulating image and symbol to effect change in the world, Disney is Warlock Supreme.

The Disney exhibit had a couple very interactive elements, but a lot of it was more information based so Science World wanted to have some additional interactive pieces adjacent to the main exhibit that would allow visitors to play with the themes of mystery and music.

Enter the Drumtron 46,000.

The intent behind the Drumtron was to give visitors a way to play with music. By making it a percussion based piece, it allowed people of all ages and musical skill levels to play. The percussive elements themselves are a snare, frying pans, a bell, hands and a bongobean. Each percussive element triggers a different sound from a sampler. The sounds have been designed to induce a sense of synesthesia. For example, hitting the bell, which is a re-used firebell, triggers the sound of a siren. While the siren and the fire bell both evoke a sense of emergency, there is also a clear disconnect between the sound and its apparent source. Similarly, the frying pans sound hi-hats made of frying eggs, the snare like a bass drum, etc.

I’m always making weird contraptions, but the Drumtron project was a great opportunity to make a product that wasn’t just stuck together with spit and string. The fact that large numbers of children were going to be playing on the piece meant that it had to be incredibly durable and easy to use. Despite my best efforts some of the elements I had originally designed turned out not to be able to withstand more than an hour of enthusiastic play. That’s called learning the hard way. After a couple trips back to the drawing board the final piece is virtually kid-proof. “Virtually” being the operative word.

I always have a number of half-baked plans for sound sculptures and new instruments at the back of my mind, and whenever an opportunity like this arises I like to use it to finish baking one or two of them up. The prototype that made it to the top of the pile this time is one I usually refer to as a “rotator”. The rotator acts as a mechanical sound sequencer by spinning a kind of play-head over a number of sound elements in sequence. The original plan was to take a number of audio input signals and gate them sequencially using the rotator as a mechanical switch, something like a motorized version of my Time Machine(2008). After working through multiple iterations of prototypes I decided that building a rotator that would actually generate the sounds rather than just gating external signals would make for a more engaging piece.

The result: the “untitled” drum machine. “Untitled” because when I had to give the gallery info on my piece it was still in such a state of chaos that I wasn’t sure what to call it. Nor did I have much energy at the time to think of names: what I really needed to do was get the damn thing to function. My plan was to build percussive elements onto an old turntable I had bought for just such an occasion, however I got overly zealous in my manipulations and inadvertently fried the thing. I spent days and days trying to repair it, but it seemed the harder i tried the more challenges arose.  Finally I discarded the record player entirely and started again from scratch – and in retrospect I’m glad I was forced to do so. The result has a simpler, more streamlined esthetic that focuses more on the percussive elements themselves and less on the means be which they are “percussed”.

The “untitled” drum machine consists of a central turntable, a piano hammer, 7 percussive elements, and a switchbox. The piano hammer, attached to the turntable, moves in a circular path, striking each of the percussive elements in turn. Each of the elements has a contact mic attached to it, which sends an audio signal to the switchbox. At the switchbox the user can choose which of the signals goes through to the headphone mix.

Check out these links to hear our stuff:

• http://www.myspace.com/spectruminterview
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL-6rKxFIDI
• http://www.minimalist.davidleith.com/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM6Q7VSFmGU

The majority of the work I’ve done on this project has centered around one common element, the “speaker/drum”. Just like it sounds, a speaker/drum is a drum with a speaker built into it. Check out this video to see a speaker/drum in action. Here’s another speaker/drum demonstration. Both of these examples work on a feedback loop. There’s a magnet (or magnets) attached to the drum skin. An electromagnetic pickup (like any guitar pickup) is used to pick up movements of the magnet and send it to an amp, which drives the speaker in the drum. When a signal is generated by bringing the pickup within range of the magnet, that signal is amplified through the speaker, which causes the drum skin to vibrate. This vibration is in turn picked up again by the pickup, and a loop is created. The interesting thing is that, unlike the shrill, ear piercing feedback you get from a vocal mic when it gets too close to a speaker, this feedback is filtered by the drum itself. Applying pressure with your hand to the drum skin, the speaker, or moving the pickup will all effect the pitch and tone of the sound generated. The resulting sounds can be surprising, at times rich and reverberant like a cello, at others a growling drone like a didgeridoo or analog synth.

When I stumbled upon this effect I got really excited. The drum-thing I had been dreaming of was coming into fruition. However, it wasn’t quite playable yet. It was good for droning, moaning, soundscapes, but it wasn’t playable like a kit yet. The next step was to make the drum percussive again. Of course, the drum itself was still a drum you could bang on, but the sounds coming from the speaker weren’t the percussive low bass tones I was hoping for. I went through a number of prototypes where I tried to generate a percussive bass tone and feed that to the speaker. At first I built what I called a “Bass/Drum”, which was basically a modified bass guitar mounted in front of a kick pedal. It worked – kinda. The sounds it produced were thumpy and low, but inconsistent and lacking in range. I found that putting the signal from the bass through a low-pass filter created just the effect I was looking for, and eventually found that the bass itself wasn’t even necessary. At present all I use is a contact mic and a kick pedal. The signal from the mic is run through the filter and sent to the drum. Boom boom! Works like a charm.

When you mix all these effects together some real magic starts to happen. The kick-drum goes boom, the magneto-feedback goes wyowyowyowyow, and the drum is still effective as the percussion instrument it was meant to be. Sometimes I further augment the sound by adding delay effects, or adding a percussion synth to the mix. I also cut down some cymbals to 6″ diameter, making the whole setup relatively portable (for a drum kit). Once I got it the whole kit into a single duffle bag and took it to a gig on the bus. It’s still large and unwieldy though, and I’m hoping to hone it down in the future.

This project has afforded me numerous opportunities both in exhibition and performance. I started putting together speaker/drum installations for art-shows like A440Hz and Knock on Woods. These art shows lead to opportunities to build interactive installations for the Vancouver International Children’s Festival and Science World (see the Drumtron 46,000 in action). Most recently, my sound-sculpture “Untitled Drum Machine“, was displayed at the Surrey Art Gallery’s “Open Sound” show where it was put to the test by gallery visitors for an entire year.

Some notable performances I’ve done on this evolving contraption include: Stockhausen’s Ylem with Giorgio Magnanensi and the Vancouver Electronic Ensemble, numerous shows with Spectrum Interview and The Vinegar Factory, and a performance with Corner at last year’s Squarewaves Electronic Music Festival.

Now that I’ve had some time to develop this kit into a playable instrument I want to get into producing tracks with it. For the past couple years I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from music production, favouring live performance instead, but I’m excited now to do some good recordings and polish them up. This is still quite rough, but here’s a bit of a preview of how that might sound.