Wednesday, 24 November 2010

Circuit Bending

Example of Circuit Bending
After thinking about ideas and projects that I can pursue with Performance Technology, I am going to research and look further into "Circuit Bending".
Circuit Bending is the short circuiting of electronic devices such as guitar effects pedals, small children toys and small synthesisers to produce new musical sound generators. The methodology of circuit bending is achieved through bisecting an electronic device and connecting any two circuit locations with a "jumper wire", as a result; this will send a current  from one part of the circuit into another. After experimenting with this, it is possible to connect components such as switches, resistors or capacitors at this point which have the ability to change the quality of the audio output of the device.




Example of a kids toy with circuit bending
From researching youtube, I have came across a range of people that have experimented with circuit bending and have used this method with electronic devices ranging from, kid toys to Gameboys:




The video above has been taken from Circuit Master's  You Tube account, the video shows the ability of circuit bending a gameboy through adding an oscillator. An oscillator is an electronic circuit which produces an electronic signal; often as a sine wave. From using the gameboy to play a Super Mario game, circuit master has used the oscillator to change and alter the sounds produced from the game.

As a result of this, I think that it would be interesting in researching further into Circuit Bending and developing an idea where I can take an electronic device and alter the sounds through adding necessary components. From this, I feel that it is important to look at videos where people have used circuit bending with technology which will give me a further knowledge within this field.
  


Wednesday, 17 November 2010

Max MSP Korg Nano Pad Patch



As a result of working with the Korg Nano Pad  and  Max MSP, I have managed to create my own patch which is featured in the video above which shows myself demonstrating and experimenting with the patch that I have created.
After connecting the Pad and carrying out a MIDI Tester on Max MSP, I wanted to create a patch that was suitable for the trigger and X/Y pads on the Nano Pad. From this, I started my patch with a "notein" object which receives MIDI information sent from the Nano Pad, after this I routed each of the 12 trigger pads through using both the "strip note" and the "route" objects. Ultimately this gave me the ability to create unique and different sounds for each of the trigger pads, I achieved this through the "cycle- object" which is an interpolating oscillator that has allowed me to create sounds for each pad. Furthermore, with the X/Y axis I wanted to use this to control the frequency of one of my pad sounds, I achieved this through using the "ctlin" object as well as the "mtof" object which gave me the ability to change the frequency of the trigger pad.
The picture below is the Max MSP Nano Pad Patch that I have created:




My MAX MSP Patch for this controller can be downloaded here