Adventure in Soundland

Thanks to Felix in Raglan of bsidebeats.com I have been introduced to the stylophone. A remarkable device that has been around for years and a wee search will bring up Rolf Harris and David Bowie as famous people enamoured of its delights.
I found a schematic and I’m going to build one.

T1 is a BJT which [...]

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So the sound thing is taken a backseat to the making of artworks.
Of course, in my own head it’s all totally interconnected and the sound things are artworks and what I do with them when they are finished is also hopefully artwork but we live in a world totally ignorant of many of the finer [...]

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The story I wrote yesterday about going to Howick was read by the tube man, I did leave the blog address with him afterall, and he wasn’t too happy about how I portrayed him. Fair enough to as in re-reading the post it was fairly obvious that I’d used a situation that was alittle fraught [...]

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So I’ve finally in a position to get into building some stuff for the upcoming exhibition in honour of the late great Peter Sauerbier. I did the invite in Photoshop and got nowhere near the amount of info that I thought I needed but, as usual, not having alot to work with ended up being [...]

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Last thursday I was in at the gallery tlking to Pierre and he mentioned something called steampunk and that someone had mentioned it to him, an american, as a place to sell my works.
I immediately thought of the movie steamboy, that anime film about the future as a steam driven adventure, and low and behold [...]

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The reverb and sustain thing has so many possibilities and this is a good one that may enjoy a certain revival. Hints at the old speaking tubes of Zeppelins and an age before even the carbon microphone.
Also I kinda forgotten about the whole DIY thing around tape op and I wish we could get the [...]

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I had a chance to do a bit of a cleanup before christmas but since then I’ve been making stuff all over the place so I’ve just made everything just one big mess and have ended up working outside on the pathway. So before I go and tidy everything up and maybe even make some [...]

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I’ve approached the Vit S guys about working with fraulien Karen and doing “Stilled life with intercontinental remote controlled mail dirigables” but have yet to recieve a reply but thats not stopping me going forward and building an instrument for her… if we end up doing something.
Might be a case of the curators running the [...]

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I’ve been hooking anything and everything up to the amp and seeing if it works as a microphone and mostly they do. This thing below confused me because I couldn’t get anything from it, but I had two so I took one apart.

And after pulling it apart I realised it was a dynamic mic. The [...]

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Kinda started on something yesterday which is kinda simple but quite involved at the same time.
I was on the net yesterday morning and found an interesting thread at experimentalist anonymous about a guy using a speaker with the cone removed to drive strings somewhat like a sustainer but closer to the ebow.
That got me [...]

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