Open Sound is a program developed by the Surrey Art Gallery to support the production and presentation of audio artforms as part of contemporary art practice. I met Open Sound’s curator, Jean Routier, as a co-contributor to last year’s Sonic Playground at the Vancouver International Children’s festival. When it came time for him to find local sound artists to contribute to this year’s Open Sound collection I was lucky enough to be invited.
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.