Week One

Plan and sketch a final project..

This course is designed to arm students with the knowledge and experience to develop a final project implementing digital fabrication, bridging computer design and machining. The project will implement the theory behind each practise. It is implied that we should try to work within a field of interest or related to previous study. It is not necessary to produce something that is divinely unique and developing already existing works is somewhat encouraged.

I would like to develop an instrument that promotes experimentation and unorthodox techniques in making music. My initial inspirations lead me to aim for something in-between Morton Subotnik’s Buchla, and Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operator series. More accurately I would like to take the philosophy that Subotnik used to develop the first transistor synthesizer e.i, not restricting the capabilities of electronic and computer processing to the heritage of acoustic instrumentation and instead utilizing the full sonic capabilities. Then combining this with the brief for the recent Pocket operator series; standalone instruments that are refined, affordable and portable.

I have chosen to begin working with a concept based within granular synthesis. This method of producing sound creates highly abstract results from musical constructs with an incredibly vast sonic dialect. The option to work in tonal, atonal and microtonal divisions of the frequency spectrum would be an interesting possibility to work with and this is generally something unseen in hardware and portable devices.

I would like the input devices to inspire out of the box approaches too, for this I have been researching the conversion of visual data into audio spectrographics and would love to see a small camera on my device working to do something like this, as well as touch strip for transposition and microphone/audio in for sampling the world around us.

Next