WalkSX from Gijs on Vimeo.

As the Sony Walkman turns 30, many of the mobile cassette’s fans wax nostalgic. But it takes Gijs Gieskes to wire up a new Rube Goldberg-style musical instrument based on the Walkman’s simple tape playback.

Follow along carefully through the signal flow of this unusual instrument:

1. The Walkman has audio on the tape itself, sampled from a Roland TR-808 drum machine.

2. Because a compact cassette has two tracks (left and right, for stereo), one track is dedicated to the drums, another to the rim shot.

3. The rim shot track is fed as a mono audio input to an Arduino (the open-source microcontroller platform). The Arduino responds to the audio level, so each time a rim shot hit occurs, it ….

4. …sends a sequence event to the Gakken SX-150. That means that you can adjust the speed of the whole contraption by…

5. …adjusting the speed of the tape. (Bless you, analog playback!)

It takes Gijs to think that way somehow: put together, these elements are actually fairly simple, but strikingly effective. Fortunately, if this does inspire new ideas, Gijs has posted all his Arduino code, so you can check this out and try something yourself.

http://gieskes.nl/instruments/?file=walksx

High-tech graffiti is all the rage these days. Alongside various forms of LED graffiti and “photonbombing” with non-intrusive video projections, some artists are moving to the medium of sound. It’s not quite the same as the geniuses risking their lives to tag subway cars and long-forgotten tunnels, and it’s totally separated from the culture originally formed around graffiti, but in this post-modern age, I guess you take what you can get.

Regine at We Make Money Not Art reports on two audio graffiti schemes presented at the Mobile Music workshop in Amsterdam. (There was a similar, mobile-themed event here in New York that I think actually fell roughly the same weekend — but I missed it! It’s a mobile meme.)

The Audio Bombing scheme involves electronic “spray paint cans” reading from analog audio tape. Placing magnetic tape on walls and instruments is a technique popularized by Nam June Paik and later Laurie Anderson (Paik did installations, Anderson built instruments). It’s fascinating to watch old analog techniques making a resurgence.

Sonic Graffiti takes a related but distinct approach: not only do you use spray cans to “paint” and “play” sound, but the cans themselves employ a gestural interface so the participant can remix the sounds as they go. All of these projects play with the notion of place, so appropriately Sonic Graffiti geo-tags the sounds.

Both projects summed up here:
Musical graffiti [WMMNA, via Make]

I still wonder, though, if any of these objects have any meaning whatsoever, devoid of their original context. Boom boxes, graffiti, spray paint … but now as art events, at conferences, rather than part of an illegal subculture roaming the elevated trains and forbidden underground worlds of the Bronx? Something just doesn’t add up for me. The projects themselves are fascinating; would they be stronger or weaker if separated from these objects? Maybe selective graffiti via cleaning makes more sense. (Well, wait a minute — even that, is that so avant-garde? Hasn’t anyone seen trucks with “Wash Me” written on them?)

On the other hand, what these objects do successfully is provide props for people to understand what an otherwise abstract sound installation is about, because they’re icons with meaning. Curious to hear what people think on comments.

Instructables has a tutorial that lets you create your own sonic graffiti project. Here, finally, we have a solution to everyone’s apparent need to interact with strangers, time-delayed, in bathrooms (well, if that is what drives people to make graffiti). I wonder if anyone has actually installed and used one of these, and what they say?

audio bathroom graffitti box [Instructables, via graftag, who seems to follow digital music making + audio graffiti topics!]

Some of the other Mobile Music workshop, covered in detail on WMMNA, may be of still greater interest to CDM readers. Think pocket gamelans, paintings producing sound, performances on circuit-bent instruments and mobile phones as rock instruments, giant wearable speakers and mics and audio “guns”, and other wearable/portable instruments. The big story seems to be the renaissance of the Cracklebox, a self-contained, sound-making instrument with touch-sensitive input, originally created in 1974 and now finding its way into modern installations. Regine covers the whole event, so I’ll leave that to her.

Reel to Wheel is a massive sound-making device built from bicycle parts and a dismantled reel-to-reel tape deck. Move around the absurdly over-sized controls, and its analog inner workings groan and creak their way through recorded sound. Move the wheel at the right speed, and you get an effect quite like scratching — or, since it’s tape, it’s really “scrubbing.”

Reel to Wheel Project Page, with wonderful hand-drawn illustrations featuring Hank the Dummy.

The project, shown last weekend at the Maker Faire, is the creation of Sasha Leitman, Steven Backer, Jesse Fox, and Jen Carlile at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), which had their own booth full of musical interfaces and goodies. Like an equally Biggie-Sized string instrument, Reel to Wheel delighted adults and terrified children with its elegant impracticality. If it seems like sculpture, that’s because it is. In the installation version of the same work, the hardware is part of a Rube Goldberg-like configuration of bikes on mannequins and full-sized stationary bicycles.

This work also suggests that this site has stumbled upon a really bizarre, evolving musical meme. Look at the elements:

Bikes. Our friend Flip Baber created a new arrangement of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy in December, recorded on bike parts. Much to our surprise, this story landed on Digg and launched to the most popular CDM story ever (promptly devastating our server), and Flip wound up on television and national radio. As it turns out, quite a lot of our readers are interested in music made with bikes, including bike ensembles, symphonies, and bikelophones, and bikes that control music and graffiti and inspire a young Frank Zappa.

Reel-to-Reel DJing: Because no one can beat-match on reel-to-reels like BBC Radiophonic Workshop wizard Delia Derbyshire.

So, I’m a little terrified that we’ve hit upon some strange statistical anomaly that seems to be tapping us directly into a musical world entirely based on tape and bicycle technology, but I’ll go with it.

The piece in question is Pot Au Feu, an incredible piece of early electronica that’s, surprisingly, not nearly as far lesser works. To dig into the Delia back catalog, head here:

Delia Derbyshire: An audiological chronology

Or visit the major site with information on her:

Delia-Derbyshire.org

There’s a real chance for the Web to create a Derbyshire-mania phenomenon. What we need now is electronic re-releases of the albums, documentary materials, and so on. Word on the street is that BBC is teaming up with YouTube; maybe this could be the first step.

Now I’m going to sheepishly get back to Reaktor programming. It’s inspiring to see the mastery of an early pioneer like her; you begin to see all your tools in a completely fresh light, and wonder what really could be possible with them.