An interactive, collaborative constellation of four MIDI sequencers, each of which can play four notes in its own time with variable pitches, note lengths, and tempos. Participants can join in the real time creation of complex musical patterns working at one of the four sequencer stations or just listen in to the results of a crowdsourced quartet. Presented by Elliot Inman of Musical Circuits as part of MUSICnight at the Center for Design Innovation, November 1, 2017.
Because unmaking something is a great way to make something new.
Circuit Bending for Beginners
Unmake a musical keyboard and discover how plastic parts connect with electronic circuits to make music. See how the piano keyboard actually works, how a power supply is wired, and how the speakers are connected to the circuit. Find out what happens when we trick the circuit into doing things it was never intended to do. With nothing more than a Phillips screwdriver and a handful of wires, we will dismantle a keyboard and turn it into an experimental orchestra of synthesized sounds. No soldering, no high voltage, no computer — only reckless good fun. Workshop lead by Elliot Inman of Musical Circuits as part of the Charlotte Mini Maker Faire hosted by Discovery Place, 10-14-2017.
Photo from Twitter: CLTMakerFaire, 10/14/2017
Tofu Time: A Solid Block of Extra Firm Time and a Very Sharp Knife
“How does time function in postmodern music? Postmodernism is profoundly temporal, but it uses, rather than submits to time. Its music shapes time, manipulates time. Time, like tonal sounds and diatonic tunes and rhythmic regularity and textual unity, becomes no longer context but malleable material.” ~ Jonathan D. Kramer, Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening 2016, p. 152.
Most drum machines build a beat from the sample up. Some, like the Roland 808, allow you to press buttons to determine the position of samples in a left to right sequence. Others, like the Akai MPC-1000, allow you to set an empty loop length and trigger a sample as your previously triggered samples loop endlessly until you fill up the loop space. Both drum machines work from the bottom up to build a beat.
This isn’t that drum machine. This is a drum machine that approaches beatmaking from the top down — a postmodern drum machine. Instead of building a beat by adding samples, this drum machine lets you build a beat by dividing time down. This is a drum machine that treats time like tofu, a big block of extra firm tofu.
“Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.” ~ Stéphane Mallarmé, 1897
John Cage is well known as the composer who formalized the use of silence as a compositional element on par with any other note or sound. He was also the composer who, though Zen Buddhism, introduced chance into composition, allowing the I Ching to dictate the terms and conditions of sound heard in a way that no egomaniacal romantic would have ever allowed. Cage was content to determine the methods of composition without micromanaging the process note-by-note. Continue reading
With an Arduino, a breadboard, and a handful of parts, you can build a MIDI controller that works as a sequencer or a classic beatbox. But the same design can be used to implement interactive MIDI effects that bend musical time and space. From real-time manipulation of tone clusters to playing the silences between the notes, simple midi parameter misdirection to an exploration of vertical time, hyperrealism and perceptual illusions – one basic Arduino MIDI build can serve as a useful platform for a wide variety of sonic explorations. In this talk, Elliot Inman of Musical Circuits will demonstrate the build and code necessary to get started and demonstrate various musical effects.
Apologies to Hiller and Isaacson, 1959, for use of the title.
The first four ominous notes of the Fifth Symphony are well known: da-da-da-dum! That musical idea seems so obvious now, but think just for a moment about how radical it was and is. First, this is a symphony that doesn’t begin with a note. It begins with a rest, an eighth note rest. It begins with a moment of silence. Second, the motif is only four notes, but the first three notes are the same note, the G, repeated three times. The fourth note, the Eb, is held until the conductor motions to continue. The orchestra is barely two bars into the music when the conductor stops the performance. Finally, if you have the entire score, you can see that every instrument plays those exact same notes (G, G, G, Eb) and does so at ff.
So, Beethoven notated a very loud repetitive group of notes to be played by an orchestra in unison – and, based on the tempo, to play it very fast. He started with silence and, two bars into the symphony, stopped the entire orchestra. And that’s why Beethoven was a genius. That’s why we’re starting with Beethoven. Because… Beethoven.
“Rule #17: If it sounds good and doesn’t smoke, don’t worry if you don’t understand it.” ~ Nicholas Collins, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking, Second Edition, Routledge, 2009, p. 144.
Collins describes it as the “world’s simplest oscillator” and that must be true. One integrated circuit, a capacitor, a resistor, a battery, and a couple of wires. That’s it. There are countless examples of this circuit available on the Internet, but Collins’ Handmade Electronic Music book provides a step-by-step guide for many such circuits. Collins has posted an earlier draft of the manual here.
“What really makes an instrument musical is that a musician decides to make use of it.” ~ Allen Strange, Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls (2nd Edition, 1983, p. 2).
This post documents two circuits connecting an Arduino to electronic controls on a breadboard and the programs necessary to generate basic MIDI note commands. These circuits can be used to make music, conduct experiments, or both. For an introduction to Arduino and MIDI, please see Arduino and Midi for Beginners. Or, you can skip all this backstory and just watch the videos: Boogie Bass or Mathematical Midi.
Musical Circuits 
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