Music, Sound, and New Media
Listening to electromagnetic radiation around the house using a homemade elektrosluch.
I was cleaning up, and found an “elektrosluch” that I made a few years back, and figured I’d dust it off and make sure that it still works. This is a device designed by LOM-Instruments that converts the vibration electromagnetic fields into sound (specifically vibrations of voltage that we can listen to through headphones, more info here ).
A quick and easy Pure Data patch-from-scratch tutorial building a feedback loop with a delay and a ring modulator.
With just two sine waves, a delay, and some feedback, we can make some pretty complex and dynamic sounds! In this patch we take a sine wave, delay it, and then ring-modulate that delay before feeding it back on itself (feeding it back into the delay, that is).
There’s no talking on this one, just building the patch, and listening to it go.
Create dynamic feedback loops on a cheap mixer and pedals. With just a few pieces of equipment you can make wonderful, interactive, and unpredictable sound systems.
Over the summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about feedback and how simple devices can create complex sounds when fed back into themselves. Alongside checking out a lot of great music, I’ve been reading about 1950s “Cybernetics” and 1990s Japanese “Noise Music”, and considering the expressive possibilities of resonance and feedback. In this video I show a simple way to put together a noisy feedback loop setup with inexpensive equipment I had sitting in my drawer.
Further Study:
Sarah Belle Read’s Tutorial on No-Input Mixing
La Synthèse Humaine, Feedback Loops Explained and Demonstrated on Serge Synthesizers
Norbert Wiener, “The Human Use of Human Beings” (1950)
David Novak, “Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation” (2013)