• new recordings.  Here is an 8:15 improv showcasing lots of my crazy devices… the 808 clone drums, ABoT bassline generator, Analog-controlled Speech Synthesizer, Drone Commander, Light Matrix Synth, Bird Box sequencer, and there’s even a WaveFucker noise solo at the end!

  House of Frankenstein

to hear more like this, visit Operation Playmate on myspace.

• analog computer simulation of a bouncing ball; I designed a true analog computer that solves the equations of motion for acceleration, velocity, and position to model this physical system; with trigger and control voltage outputs.
• analog clap percussion synthesizer; based on the Roland TR-808/TR-909 clap circuitry, with extra mods and tweaks.  It turned out VERY cool!  Built for Erich Ragsdale.
• synchro-start DIN sync outputs for the Big Box o’ Techno; makes it possible to link up a Roland TR-606 and x0xb0x via 24PPQN DIN-Sync. The synchro-start feature guarantees beatmatched entrances.
• MIDI input breadboard plug-in for AVR experiments; I’m collaborating with Mike a.k.a. The Mysterious H to design an 8-bit hardware synth PCB based on the SN76494 / SN76489, which are cool old Sega sound chips.  (Mike accidentally burned up his Atmel STK500 messing with MIDI so I tried to  build him a goof-proof MIDI input…)
• modifiying vintage drum machines; I studied how an old-school Seeburg Select-a-Rhythm drum box works and came up with a great set of mods that gives seven variations on each of the original patterns.  It is for sale, on eBay soon…

a unique drone machine with 2 oscillators, 2 LFOs, and a very nasty resonant filter

Now available in a variety of colors!

Contact me if you are interested in a custom build.

The SUN sounds amazing, it makes a blasting static sound like pink noise through my guitar amp. I was really digging the sound of the sun and turned it up loud while I ate dinner. It started to go down and the sky turned a deeper blue color. I switched the amp to the distortion channel and cranked the gain up all the way to hear the details. The camera was focused on a patch of blue sky through the trees. After a minute of acclimation, I heard the faintest layer of coherent sound through the intense pink noise static. I sat down next to the amp and listened very hard! It sounded like tones. At first I did not believe my ears and blew it off. A minute later it was there again, it sounded like voices! It had to be radio interference, I thought. To test this, I put my hand in front of the lens to block the light from outside. The noise blast went away, and the voices were gone. If it was normal radio interference it would have been clear through this experiment, would you agree?. I moved my hand back away and the noise blast returned. I will swear that in this noise I heard something like a conversation between a man and a woman… and some tones inbetween. It was impossible to recognize the words or syllables, but it had the pitch fluctuations and broken intervals of speech.

Thus the fact is, I heard voices from the sky, in the sound of the sun.

So now the question is what kind of technology could be causing this??! I’ve never heard of commercial open-air lightwave communications - it seems foolish… light doesnt go around corners.

After the sun was down completely, the noise and voices were no longer to be heard. I will try again tomorrow and record anything interesting.

*** UPDATE 6/1/08: INEXPLICABLE PHENOMENON EXPLAINED! ***

I followed up the original sun listening session with a more controlled experiment. This time I recorded the sound of the sunrise at dawn. I focused on the same patch of blue sky as before and recorded for about 20 minutes. The pink noise of sunlight gradually rose above the amplifier’s hiss, and the recording showed a nice increase in amplitude as the sunlight brightened. As before, faint sounds were audible beneath the roar. I repeated the control experiment of blocking light to the camera with my hand. This time, I was able to hear the voices regardless of whether the sun entered the camera… so my original conclusion is now in question. Listen for yourself. It sounds like Christian radio…. “Jeeeeezus Christ!”

Sound of Dawn

bent Taalmala

Taalmala and Sunadamala 1

Taalmala and Sunadamala 3

 *** UPDATE 5/23:  The auction has ended ***

The new owner is electronic artist Sin:Ned from Shatin, Hong Kong.

How I came up with the WaveFucker is a long story. The condensed version goes like this: I’ve been considering different algorithms to generate interesting drum patterns. I thought about having a FIFO shift register with data feeding into it, and a clock oscillator driving it. A scanner resamples data in the FIFO at a different rate… so the output is sort of a jittery rendition of the input. Then it dawned on me that I was using the basic architecture of a digital pitch shifter, but really lo-fi.

To understand this concept, imagine that you are flying a helicopter above a highway with cars. Imagine the cars are equally spaced and you are looking down on them. You can fly the helicopter at whatever speed you want to relative to the cars below. You’re looking straight down. Every time a car crosses your view, tap your finger. So, if you are hovering still above the highway, you are tapping at the same speed as the cars (zero pitch shift). If you are flying faster than the cars, you are tapping slower than the actual rate the cars are entering the highway; that is a down pitch shift… fly backwards, and that’s an up shift.

I modeled this in Reaktor and it makes interesting polyrhythms and syncopation when run at rhythm speed. I cranked it up to audio speed and added a guitar input. As a guitar effect, its a really fuzzy and completely inaccurate pitch-shifter, meaning it doesnt shift notes by a constant interval; the interval depends on the pitch you play. Somewhat like a ring modulator crossed with a bit crusher. Ascending scales can become descending scales and vice versa. All very fuzzy and clipped sounding.

Anyhow, since I’d rather play with hardware than software, I designed the Reaktor patch as something that could be translated to hardware based on 4000-series CMOS logic. It turns out it can be done with only six IC’s! I sketched out a schematic and laid out a protoboard using Eagle. About 8 hours of assembly and the hardware version was up and running on a 9V battery.

My hardware WaveFucker has these controls:

• fuzz gain; high-low gain button
• “freq” oscillator w/ high-low range button (50Hz - 14kHz)
• “spectrum” oscillator w/ high-low range button (50Hz - 14kHz)
• scan forward/reverse button
• scan freeze button
• filter drive knob
• filter frequency knob
• filter LPF/BPF button
• fuzz / wavefucker blend
• feedback mode button

The fuzz circuit is adapted from Craig Anderton’s Tube Sound Fuzz, and the filter is adapted from the PAiA Syndrum circuit. I borrowed the basic idea of the blend control from a MiniMoog schematic; its an H-pad with the middle resistor replaced by a potentiometer; the potentiometer’s wiper goes to ground, and the output resistors go to the inverting input of an op-amp. In the MiniMoog, this is behind the OSC3-Noise blender knob.

Here are some recordings of the hardware version in Feedback mode; its oscillating with no outside input. Its playing through a small Fender amp with the reverb turned up.

wavefucker feedback #0

wavefucker feedback #1

Visit this page for more sounds of the WaveFucker.

In feedback mode, all of the controls are interactive and it gives a surprising range of sounds with bizzare harmonic structure. The results are quite similar to the Reaktor patch but hold some nice surprises and a more organic tone. Some of the sounds remind me of the bizzare trashed-out organ noises in the beginning of Facelift by Soft Machine… BTW, if you know what Mike Ratledge did to the organ to make it sound like that, please let me know!

I haven’t gotten around to recording the WaveFucker as a guitar effect but I will post that in the future.

For those who are interested, you can download WaveFucker as a Reaktor patch. You should be able to use it as a VST if you have Reaktor installed: WaveFucker for Reaktor. The main difference is the implementation of a short delay in the feedback loop. The hardware version has no delay. The cool thing about the delay is that it gives the WaveFucker a pitch memory. Play a guitar note into it, and (properly adjusted) once you let off the note, the pitch is remembered and continues to play indefinitely until you play the next note. Very weird!

Lets stay on the topic of charging capacitors with solar cells but think more creatively. What’s a solar cell made of, and what is a capacitor made of… can they be combined into one device, basically a flat capacitor that absorbs light and stores it as charge to be used later? Traditional photovoltaic (solar) cells are essentially large area semiconductor diodes based on crystalline silicon, while newer and more efficient photovoltaics are being designed with layered films of material such as titanium dioxide particles and carbon nanotubes. Capacitors are built with layered structure as well. The basic structure of a capacitor is a pair of conductive surfaces separated by a thin insulating material; these are typically wound into a tight spiral roll which is why capacitors are often cylindrical in shape. Recently a special class of capacitors has come on the market, known as electric double-layer capacitors, capable of storing thousands of times more charge than ‘normal’ caps of the same size. Instead of the traditional spiral construction, supercapacitors rely on the huge surface area of activated carbon granules.

So photovoltaics and capacitors are both sandwiches of some sort, right? Can they be combined to make a flat capacitor that charges itself in the sun?

I searched and found an article dated 2004 in a physics journal that reports the creation of such a device, called a photocapacitor. Japanese scientists combined dye-coated titanium dioxide, activated carbon, and a platinum-coated glass electrode into a six-layered structure and observed its successful conversion of light to charge. Hopefully this technology can be developed to the point that it is practical for commercial use. If that becomes possible, the cost of utilizing solar energy could decrease because the need for expensive batteries to maintain power during dark cycles would be obviated. And fewer batteries are always a good thing for safety and the environment.

Maybe somebody can figure out how to assemble a DIY photocapacitor based on the article I cited above? Supercapacitor-grade activated carbon is available, as is high quality titanium dioxide. Transparent conductive glass seems a little trickier to find commerically, but here is one example. Somebody should give it a try. Don’t forget to patent it if it works, b/c you could become stinking rich.

update: in 2005 the same laboratory reported a moderately improved version of their original photocapacitor, using three electrodes instead of two. This design gave a five-fold increase in energy storage density.

I opened up the projector and did some research on the chips inside… I was able to find datasheets for the A-D and D-A converter chips and targeted them in the hunt for interesting visual effects. By inspecting the densely-populated SMT main board I gained some insight into the flow of video data in the projector. All of the inputs are analog video of different formats. The analog RGB signals are routed through A-D converters, and once digitzed, the data is held in registers for processing by a VLSI circuit that presumably re-formats the resolution and scan rate to accomodate the projector’s optics. From there the digitized video is converted back to analog via A-D converters (one for each color red, green, and blue), and hits the analog LCD drive circuitry.

To safely probe the various (mis)-connections I wanted to make, I wired up a 1k resistor and a thin wire. The resistor limits current flow and prevented damage as I made various connections. In the end I came up with six bends that were unique, and installed three toggles and a rotary switch on the front panel. These bends created color-shifting effects, lo-fi pixelization, and ghosting… not too interesting on their own, but when combined with a live camera feedback loop, I saw some rather interesting imagery. Focusing the camera on the projected image created the classic feedback tunnel effect, and when augmented by the bends I had wired, the tunnel was transformed into a beautiful fractal-like effect.

Due to a mishap, I accidentally blew up something in the blue channel’s drive circuitry so my projector only does red and green now. This occurred in a cavalier moment when I probed the circuit without a 1k safety resistor in the jumper wire… should have known better.

Unfortunately I did not have the chance to record or photograph the output seriously. However, I did run into a nice blogger named Stef Lewandowski, who interviewed me while I was showing off the projector at Dorkbot. You can visit his blog to hear his interview with me:

http://www.steflewandowski.com/?p=363

Austin Dorkbot veterans BleepLabs and ArcAttack showed off some killer hardware at the event as well. A CBS Morning News camera crew was present and it appeared they covered the entire event thoroughly. The story hasn’t appeared on their website yet, but I will keep checking here to see if and when it is published.

The tracks on the disc play different pitched notes, arranged low to high from the inside track to the outside. I’ve made two discs so far. One has six tracks and plays notes from a scale in just intonation. The second disc, which is heard in this recording, has ten tracks, and plays the 8th thru 17th tones from the harmonic series. The ten pitches cover just over an octave; it is an 8-tone scale, but not equal tempered. Here are the pitches on the disc relative to the fundamental, which would be heard three octaves below the lowest pitch on the disc. If that makes any sense - it is overtone music.

• Track 1: 8th - three 8ves
• Track 2: 9th - three 8ves + maj 2nd
• Track 3: 10th - three 8ves + maj 3rd
• Track 4: 11th - three 8ves + flat dim 5th
• Track 5: 12th - three 8ves + perf 5th
• Track 6: 13th - three 8ves + sharp min 6th
• Track 7: 14th - three 8ves + flat min 7th
• Track 8: 15th - three 8ves + maj 7th
• Track 9: 16th - four 8ves
• Track 10: 17th - four 8ves + min 2nd

The disc is made of transparent material with black markings. If you shine light through it while it spins, the light intensity is modulated because the disc chops the beam. And if you shine flashing LEDs through it and catch the light with a pickup system, and it starts making music.

photosequencer

In this recording I’m playing the disc by holding a special LED flasher over the disc and moving it in patterns while aiming it at the pickup. The flasher has three LEDs that blink in synchronization at different frequency ratios. (Its actually part of an analog synth I’m building, but it turns out to be a nice source of blinking LEDs for this purpose!) Very small gestures control the polyrhythmic melody sequences. Its challenging to play, and I can see several ways to improve the flasher to make it more playable and expressive. I also need to find the cause of that obnoxious clicking sound.

So come on out and be there… should be good times. And check back here afterward for my take on how it went.