When I came back to record the circuit and put it in its enclosure today, I came across a problem – there was no sound coming out. The circuit was still working somewhat as the LED was still turning on, however something was going wrong. I noticed a couple of connections had come unsoldered where I had previously encountered trouble keeping them in place, mainly around the jacks. I soldered them back together and then saw that the ground connection from the volume pot had come unsoldered from the PCB. I soldered it back together, but there was still a problem somewhere. It seemed to be that there would be no sound coming from the circuit, but when I’d put my finger on the volume pot some noise would come out. I’d either get a tiny bit of my guitar signal or just a buzz, which was frustrating. I’m guessing my body was acting as some part of the circuit that wasn’t working. I checked the whole circuit multiple times but couldn’t find what was wrong – I decided to just put it in its enclosure for now and I will fix it in the future. It could be anything from bad soldering to a faulty part, but I can’t find anything visibly wrong at the moment.

The enclosure did also prove to be more challenging than I thought it would – I’ve realised that there’s a reason most of them aren’t made of soft material! However I did manage to get the circuit in there, although it was a bit of a squeeze. I started off by ripping all of the stuffing out of the toy:

I cut out holes in the eyes for the volume and tone knobs and a hole where the nose might be for the switch and the LED.

Then I put the components in:

Looks particularly hellish! I was originally going to place the battery inside the toy, but I realised I would have to undo all the needlework at the bottom every time I need to change the battery, so I’ve decided to leave it outside.

Now it was time to stuff the toy again:

I then had to sew the bottom shut. I placed the input and output jacks at the bottom (input on the left, output on the right), and sewed around them:

This is the finished product! Even though I have been experiencing difficulties with the reliability of the circuit, I am happy with how it looks – really absurd and a little scary. After I have handed in the project I am going to cut the toy open and have another crack at the circuit. I’d also like to find something to hold the LED and switch in place as they don’t feel too secure in their fittings. Still, I am happy to finally see somewhat of a finished product, and I know it can’t be far off fully functioning. The soft toy enclosure is a little impractical as nothing can really be held in place (apart from the tone and volume knobs as I put the tops on after the I put the potentiometers through which keeps them in place). It still looks how I wanted it to though, although next time I will probably try to make something in a harder enclosure.

Last year when we were making pieces for the Creative Sound Projects unit, my lecturer at the time said something that made me think. We were supposed to make a course Bandcamp account, where we could all upload our compositions for people to listen to and potentially pay for. It was to be run by us, with different students having different roles assigned to them. Along with a friend, I was assigned the task of finalising a name for the project. That was when my lecturer said something along the lines of “please don’t call it anything tongue-in-cheek because it degrades the value of your art”. It wasn’t exactly those words, but it was something similar.

My immediate reaction was “Why?” – To me, humour is very much a part of the art I would like to create and I think it’s a large part of the art I enjoy. Without going into too much detail on the blog, I have had a lot of traumatic events happen to me over my life, and humour and art have always been an amazing form of escapism for me, as I’m sure is the same for many people. I know it’s just the name of a Bandcamp page, but I do think it opens up an interesting discussion about the role humour plays in art, and how seriously it can be taken.

Until a few months ago, a prejudice against humour in my practice did exist in my head. I never really knew why, I just thought that whilst it’s good to laugh, proper art (and music as well, in my case) tackles difficult issues and takes itself seriously. Then I noticed I was finding it really challenging to sit down and create anything – I really felt as though I was in a slump, or just ‘not very creative’, for a long time. I would have ideas, but I’d say no. It felt as though there were a voice in my head saying “Don’t be ridiculous, that idea is stupid. People will not understand what you’re doing, and it will be less valid than other art”. I was having a hard time creating anything until I decided to just try making silly art and writing funny songs for a little bit to see where it went. I found it so freeing. I found that I love to make art that has a bit of a ‘stupid’ side to it, because I am expressing who I am as a person. To give you an example of what I mean, for my first practical project at LCC I made a piece about my experiences with sleep paralysis and night terrors. It wasn’t a bad piece, but I didn’t enjoy the process of making it either. I think this was because I was recalling intensely traumatic memories. Two weeks before I made the piece, for the first time in my life I had woken up in the middle of the night, sat bolt upright and started screaming because I thought someone was in the room trying to kill me. I had also been experiencing very regular sleep paralysis for around 3 years at that point, where dreams would turn sinister and melt into reality, only for me to wake up with the physical feeling and auditory sensation of a man sitting on top of me, swearing at me, strangling me. Looking back on it, of course I can see why I didn’t enjoy making that piece! I don’t enjoy talking about it now. It was taking me to a mental space I really didn’t want to be in. This year, I’m making a distortion box out a stupid emoji toy I found in a high street charity shop in Kent. Yes, it may not be going as deep inside my psyche as the sleep paralysis piece, but I also feel as though I’m getting myself across more through the art I’m making now. Although in many ways I do come from a position of privilege (white, male, middle class, born in a relatively stable country), I have also had a very difficult life on my own terms and I just want to make art that makes me happy (and hopefully others who feel the same way I do).

None of this is to say that I feel that art that does tackle sensitive issues or just takes itself more seriously is less valid or less enjoyable than humorous art – they are equally as valid. I just feel from my own experience that there can be a preconception that art that doesn’t take itself so seriously at face value doesn’t have a serious message behind it. I’m not the only one who shares the opinion – in a 2020 article for The Guardian, journalist Alexi Duggins writes that there is “no good reason for comedy’s inexplicable lack of recognition as high culture”. He asks if “there is something frivolous about an art form that exists to make people smile?” and gives examples of humour in wider art forms such as films and literature constantly being ignored; for example, out of the past 40 Best Picture awards at the Oscars, only 6 awards have been given to comedic films. Although this is not fully related to sound art, I do feel from my own experiences that within the sphere of art, humour tends to not be taken so seriously.

So, having said all this, I am quite happy to be making a playful piece of art for this unit and I am happy to have accepted humour and comedy as part of my practice who I am as an artist. I think I will still occasionally go back to making pieces with heavier themes, but silliness and being a little tongue-in-cheek is part of who I am and the point I want to get across.

Bibilography

1. Duggins, A. (2020) Why is humour so rarely treated as high art?, The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/oct/26/solved-why-is-humour-so-rarely-treated-as-high-art (Accessed: November 22, 2022).

I’ve decided that my final circuit for this element will be a distortion box placed inside one the emoji cuddly toy that I bought a few weeks ago (at the bottom of my breadboard synth blog!). I was originally going to build a touch sensitive synthesiser in there, where the more someone squeezes the toy, the more distorted/horrifying sound it makes – however I realised the circuit I make will probably be very delicate, so I don’t know if it will react well to being squeezed a lot.

For the distortion circuit I have decided to follow the Junkyard Jam Box book again, this time building the ‘Mud ‘n Sizzle’ fuzz preamp. Before I started soldering it together I was still feeling a little intimidated by the whole process as the previous synth I made did not go so well for me. However, this time I have the correct PCB and all the right parts to make it work!

To start off, I soldered one wire to each of the potentiometers I’m using for the circuit – one controls volume, and the other tone. I also soldered an electrolytic capacitor to the tone knob:

I then soldered the power switch to the battery clip and a resistor, which in turn was soldered to an LED:

I then started soldering the wires to the input and output jacks, and attached to the volume knob to the output jack:

It was now time to start soldering components to the PCB, I started with the transistor, two resistors and a capacitor:

The way of making connections on this PCB, which has no predefined traces, is to arrange the components you want to connect in a line and then solder the connections together. It looked like this:

I subsequently snipped the ends of the wires. Then I started to solder the potentiometers and jacks onto the board, along with another couple of resistors:

The final thing to do was to create a ground connection through the circuit. I did this by connecting the negative lead of the battery clip to the board, in between the bottom connections of the two resistors that run parallel to each other in the picture above. After that I got some uninsulated wire and ran connections from the potentiometers, jacks and the LED to the the same row as the negative battery wire. I employed the same connecting technique I had used before by soldering all of the connections together. It looked like this:

Something I found really difficult was that the uninsulated wire kept disconnecting from the jacks after I had soldered it on. I don’t know why it kept doing that – maybe it could’ve been to do with the fact I’m relatively inexperienced with soldering my technique isn’t great. My technique to get around this was to wrap the end of the cable around the connections as much as possible and then solder it together. It didn’t seem like a 100% correct thing to do, but it works for now.

It was now time to test out the circuit! Initially I wasn’t getting any light on the LED, which meant the signal was going wrong somewhere. After checking the PCB I noticed one of the ground wires had come disconnected – I re-soldered it and also moved some wires which I noticed were touching parts of the circuit they weren’t supposed to be connected to. One of these must have fixed the issue because the light turned on after that.

I took the circuit downstairs to test it out on my valve amplifier with my guitar. At first, it was picking up radio signals and not much else. I was a bit concerned but I plugged my guitar in anyway. The radio noises stopped soon after (I’m not sure why), and I got a really nice crunchy-fuzzy overdrive sound! What a result! This is my first circuit I’ve soldered together that actually works. Now I need to put it in the emoji toy…

I’ve attached an unlisted YouTube link of me playing my guitar through the circuit as myblog won’t let me upload longer videos:

https://youtube.com/shorts/e-W2Q7CRYVI

I am really pleased with the outcome of this as part of me was expecting the circuit not to work at all. I think I’ve gained a lot in confidence from finishing the circuit off, and now I feel ready to take on more challenging circuits in the future. One thing I’m concerned about is the radio noises – they started and then stopped without me doing much so I’m worried there might be something temperamental about the circuit still. I’m also concerned about the fact that when the circuit is in bypass mode the signal coming through is still a little fuzzy, even though I’m playing through the clean channel of my amp. Still, the circuit makes a great distortion sound so for now I am happy.

For my first attempt at using a PCB (printed circuit board), I have tried to build the ‘Single-Chip Space Invader’ synth from ‘Junkyard Jam Band’, a DIY electronics book written by David Erik Nelson. This is a very simple synthesiser that uses two oscillators to create a sound that should resemble the synths from old video games. It can be either be controlled by a red button that triggers notes individually, or a switch can be flicked to make the synthesiser keep producing a continuous note whilst the user twists the knobs (potentiometers) around to control the pitch.

I have only attempted soldering once before, and that was in my first year at LCC when I made a contact microphone – I found it difficult. I was a little apprehensive to return to it, however I am going to need to learn how to do it for my final circuit, so it’s best to have something else to practice on first! I followed the step-by-step guide in the book, which was very helpful. I started by soldering a switch, LED, resistor and battery clip together, which looked this:

I then soldered some wire to the three potentiometers and the button and switch controls. I then connected the output jack, switches and 10k ohm potentiometer together. After this, it was time to start adding components to the PCB. The first to go on the board was an IC, similar to the one I used on the breadboard circuit a few weeks ago.

One problem with this project is that I have been using a PCB with a different layout to the one shown in the book, which is pretty much the same design as the breadboard I was using a few weeks ago. This PCB only has long vertical connections, and no breaks in between them at all. This meant that in order to avoid a short circuit, I had to scratch away at the metal between the two sides of the the IC with a file so that they weren’t connecting. I ended up being able to do this quite easily, although the layout of the PCB would prove to be more confusing to me later…

I kept going with the synth, soldering jumper wires and capacitors in:

I did have a problem with the capacitor at the bottom, where the legs weren’t long enough to bridge the gap between holes that the book was telling me to make. I solved this by getting a piece of wire and soldering it along from the hole below the capacitor to the hole where the capacitor was supposed to go. As the board is connected vertically, this meant that the wire was still making the same connection as the capacitor was supposed to.

One of the first big mistakes I made was to solder the red diodes in the wrong way around as I didn’t realised they were polarised. When I realised I’d done this, instead of trying to desolder the joint, I just clipped the diodes above the joint and soldered them each one row up. This would work, however I was leaving myself less and less room on the board which was soon going to become a problem.

I kept soldering and eventually added all the switches and potentiometers to the board, which looked like this:

However, my problem came when trying to add power. I started to get confused due to the different layout of my PCB to the one in the book. As the one in the book had a layout with two separate vertically connected lines at the bottom and top, it made sense to me how Nelson was adding power to the circuit as it was pretty much the same concept as what I had done before with my first circuit. However, I was starting to run out of room on my PCB, especially at the bottom, so I really wasn’t sure how to connect it all up to power. I could’ve maybe worked something out at the time, however I was really unsure of my knowledge of circuits and soldering at the time and wasn’t feeling confident enough to change the routing of the circuit. As I was eager to get a start on my final project, I decided to leave this synth for now, however I will be coming back to it (or rebuild it) in the future, as at the time or writing I am now feeling a lot more confident with circuits and I was very nearly finished with it.

Being able to build synth designs on a breadboard is a really handy way of testing circuits out before you permanently solder them onto a circuit board. However, what if you wanted an even less resource-intensive way of building circuits that also could also be quicker to use?

Pure Data is a free to obtain programming software first written by Professor Miller Puckette in 1996. However, the difference between Pure Data and other proprietary sound softwares such as Pro Tools Or Max MSP is that it is open source, meaning users can change, rewrite, and rerelease their own versions of the program. There are many different versions of the software users can download, but for my first couple of tries I only used PD Vanilla which is the most basic version.

My first synth was a basic sine tone with a slider to control the pitch. At first I had success with it, however after a while the slider stopped working properly and only made a clicking noise. I tried to edit the frequency value on Pure Data but every time I clicked on it, I wasn’t allowed to edit anything even though I was on edit mode. I could see that the frequency number was very low, however it wouldn’t change no matter what I tried. I found this a little frustrating but it may have been something I overlooked that was causing this – below is a video of the sine wave with the clicking noise:

My next encounter with Pure Data was an attempt to recreate the ‘Noise Toaster’ DIY synth by Music From Outer Space.

This was more successful, although I had difficulty finishing it as I was beginning to find the software very confusing and didn’t really know where to take it. At the top there is a slider which controls the pitch of the synth. There are two sound waves; a sine wave and a saw wave. There is a little box that says ‘send frequency’, under the slider – this then sends the frequency to the two waveforms which have ‘receive frequency’ commands. This means that the pitch of both waves is controlled by the slider. This is a video of what the synth sounded like at the point that I stopped:

It’s a very basic sound, but quite good, especially if you were to run it through some effects.

I do like the concept of Pure Data, and the idea of of open source software is amazing, and I hadn’t really heard of it before. The fact that the software is so accessible to anyone with a computer, and the fact that people can modify it to suit their own needs, is impressive and I would like to explore more free software. However, in practice I did find Pure Data a little confusing and not quite as engaging as real-life circuit building. It’s certainly technically easier to build patches on the software as you don’t have to physically obtain parts and solder them together/put them on a breadboard, however I personally find it harder to visualise what I am trying to build if there’s no tangible components that I can put together. I appreciate that this is just my experience though, and I’m sure it is a very useful software for many practising artists. However, I think I will be sticking to physical circuits for the remainder of this project.

For my next step into DIY electronics, I’ve made a simple synthesiser using a few components connected together on a piece of technology called a breadboard. A breadboard is a very simple piece of kit, which consists of a number of contact points connected together by metal strips. Below is an example of the breadboard I have been working with:

As you can see, there are two lines of contact points at both the top and bottom of the breadboard. These are connected by horizontal strips of metal. The contact points in the middle of the breadboard are connected by vertical strips of metal, with a break in the middle to separate the two halves of the board.

This circuit was very easy to build, and is borrowed from the 2005 book ‘Handmade Electronic Music’, by Nicolas Collins. All it consists of is an Integrated Circuit (IC), a resistor, a capacitor, a few jumper cables, a 9 volt battery and an audio cable to connect it to an interface (via a couple of crocodile clips). Here’s the finished circuit:

In the circuit what you can see is that the positive and negative (ground) terminals of the battery are connected to the top and bottom rows of the breadboard respectively. The positive terminal is then connected to pin 14 (top left) of the IC via a jumper lead, and the ground is connected to pin 7 (bottom right). The resistor is connected to pins 1 and 2 of the IC, whilst the capacitor is connected to pin 1 of the IC and the ground of the circuit. A jumped cable connected to the ground is then connected to a crocodile clip, which in turn is then connected to the audio cable. Another jumper cable is also connected to pin 2 of the IC, which then is also connected to the audio cable via a crocodile clip.

Whilst all of the physical information about the synthesiser can be engaging, what I find most interesting about it is how it sounds! The circuit will usually just make a basic square wave, however I’ve added a light-dependent resistor into the circuit so that the pitch of the wave can be altered. It alters the pitch by varying the resistance depending on how much light gets in – the more light comes through, the less resistance is put into the circuit, which allows a larger amount of electrical current to flow through. More light therefore = higher pitch, and vice versa. This means the instrument can be played in a similar way to a theremin. This is how it sounds in its most basic form:

And here’s a video of me playing the synth like a theremin (the high pitched noise is someone else’s synth in the background, mine is the much lower pitched sound):

I decided I wanted to take this setup home for the week so I could record it and mess around with a few effects in my DAW. Here’s the same sound you just heard but with a few effects (autofilter, ring modulation, pitch shift, distortion, and a couple of others) to make it sound like a strange room of tweeting birds with a chainsaw in the background:

Here’s the same settings but with the autofilter turned off – this gives a very horrifying distorted sound:

Eventually I’d love to be able to make these effects as analog circuits in their own right!

For all of the previous recordings I was using a phone torch to illuminate the light dependent resistor as I felt the pitch was too low otherwise, so I decided to change things up a bit – in this next recording I switched out the 4.7μf capcitor which I had been using for a 0.1μf capacitor. This affects the range of the pitch that the light-dependent resistor will sweep through, and in this case as it is a smaller capacitor, makes the signal higher-pitched. Coupled with a rotary speaker emulation, this can give quite a nice ‘robotic bleep’ sound:

I also experimented with a touch sensitive resistor, which applies different amounts of resistance of the circuit depending on how hard you squeeze it. It was fun to experiment with, however I found it a bit less expressive than the light-dependent resistor:

Whilst on a break from making crazy sounds, I took a trip downstairs to the charity shop from the studio I was working in. I found a couple of children’s toys that I thought could be potentially candidates as housing for my final piece for this element. I know it’s quite a long way off still, but these toys inspired me quite a bit and I think I may have a couple of ideas for what I may want to exhibit in the second element of the unit as a whole.

Where is art without a sense of humour and play, after all? And wouldn’t it be amazing to enter a devilish room of these two and their friends screaming at you?

Bibliography

1. Collins, N. (2006) Handmade electronic music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. New York, New York: Taylor & Francis Group.

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.