Forum wk 2

I think I mastered my soldiering abilities this week. I had some fairly average soldiering attempts when making my necklace, but by the time it came to creating the piezo mic's I was a pro.

When it came to actually experimenting with the piezo mic's I teamed up with Tyrell. I was really keen to try getting the sounds of underwater, so we put a condom around the piezo to make it water proof, plugged it into a mini amp and put in a bucket of water. This didn't create any sound whatsoever.Moving the water around didn't do much either.

Then I remembered that my next door neighbors had a water feature which used a pump to blow bubbles up in a pot of water and shells. So we tried that.

Originally we tried simply submersing the mic once more, but the movement of the water seemed to minimal to have any audio results. Then I moved the mic next to the actual point where the water was bubbling and bingo, an interesting sound came through. Tyrell suggested putting a shell between the mic and the water bubbles (resting the mic on the back of the shell.) This added an interesting texture to the sound. To finish up with the water feature I also placed the mic on the water pump which sounded similar to some sort of an engine to me.







Other sounds recorded was Tyrell typing on his keyboard and my friend Faolan plucking a tennis racket. I would like to use some of the tennis racket samples in a composition.

Water Bubbles

Water with Shell

Bubble Generator

Typing

Playing the Tennis Racket

Reference:


Collins, Nicolas. “Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking.” TF-ROUTL, 2006.

Haines, Christian. “Forum - Week 2 – Input and output.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 2nd August 2007.