To kick off second year at LCC, I have chosen two out of the three options available to me for the first element of the Specialising and Exhibiting unit. These are ‘Sound for Screen’ and ‘Expanded Studio Practice for Twenty First Century Sound Artists’. I’m not sure which of these two I would like to hand in for yet (could be both!), so I’ll be documenting my process in each of these fields until I come to a conclusion on what I want to make.

As a first exercise in the Expanded Studio Practice Unit, I experimented with constructing an extremely basic synthesiser out of a small speaker driver, some crocodile clips, a couple of paperclips and a 9 volt battery, which looked and sounded like this:

As you can hear, it’s quite noisy, but construction of it is very simple. It works by connecting the negative terminal of the speaker up to the negative terminal of the of the battery using a crocodile clip – another crocodile clip is hooked up to the positive terminal of the speaker driver, however the other end of the cable is attached to a paper clip. A third cable is then attached to the positive terminal of the battery and the other end is also attached to a paper clip. What happens when you touch the two paper clips is that a connection is made, therefore causing the speaker to make a single oscillation. What’s interesting is that when you then put both paperclips on top of the speaker cone (like I’ve done in the video), they then bounce off of each other when the speaker oscillates, causing it to oscillate again multiple times. A higher frequency of oscillations means a higher pitch comes out, hence the high-pitched noisy sound in the video.

This primitive synthesiser can be a bit temperamental, as when experimenting with it I found that it was a bit of a game of luck as to whether the paperclips would actually bounce off each other for more than half a second at a time, however it was still fun to make and I’m excited to produce more complicated circuits in the future. I’ve never really experimented with creating instruments in this hands-on way before and it’s definitely something that appeals to me.