Monday, October 09, 2006

An Audio Do Da Day

(Karina, Terin, Julia, and Alissa making music.)

Today we had quite the audio experience. We had a Bent Music session in our classroom at Birkbeck College. A man named Ben came in and talked to us about his love of distorted/hacked music. He did much more than talk, however, as he demonstrated his own sound projects and then allowed us to take toys apart to create our own sounds. The concept of distorted/hacked music is basically the process of taking apart toys, guitar petals, stereos, or anything that can make sound, and manipulating their circuit borads in order to create a new and interesting mixture of sounds. We watched Ben play and create "music" with a Furby's circuit board, and then watched him attach the circuit board to another toy's board to mix and project the sounds. While it is an interesting concept, Ben seemed more excited than I felt about the screeching sounds being music. But hey, as long as he was passionate about it and teaching others how to do interesting things with audio, good for him.

My scepticism of the session was put aside, however, when we actually got to make sounds ourselves. Simply taking apart the toys was fun enough because that's something that I could never do as a child. And as if that wasn't enough, we got to scratch and bend the circuit boards to make the sounds screech, warble, mute, etc. I took apart a toy phone, and though it's circuit board didn't really produce any spectacular results, it was still fun to play with. Eventually, people began hooking their toys together to mix the differnt sounds, and then we created stereos to project the hideous sounds even louder. I wonder if we disturbed anyone in the building; there was definitly a class next to us...

Continuing in the vein of our audio day, and in preparation for the radio show we will be creating on Thursday, we had an audio workshop. I am glad to say that 16 people showed up and were able to fit into the room that 5 of us girls are sharing (it's very tight quarters, but we are managing well). We basically learned about different types of mics and where to hold them, and listened to/looked at several examples that Terin (our audio guru) made/projected on our wall as examples of good and bad interviews. So, I am looking forward to creating a little talk show segment about the Frieze Art Fair with Julia. We'll see how that actually goes...Yea for new mediums!

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