i have been working on a new instrument design, conceived of during a few conversations with berglind tomasdottir. it’s called a “hrokkur,” which is a play on words in icelandic, a blend between the words “rokkur,” meaning spinning-wheel, and “hrokk,” meaning rock (‘n roll). the instrument is very similar to a hurdy-gurdy, which is a medieval stringed instrument that makes sound with a circular bow. i designed the instrument using readily-available, frequently recycled materials– mainly a guitar and a bike.

as you can see, the hrokkur hides very little about its construction. it even comes apart, to make touring easier! unlike the hurdy-gurdy, the hrokkur invites the performer to tinker with the sounds of the instrument, by making all of its mechanisms accessible. furthermore, the hrokkur can play continuous glissandi, which affords the instrument even more flexibility, in the context of microtonal musics. the traditional way of playing hrokkur is to pull one of the strings up to the wheel with your fingers, allowing a great degree of freedom in tuning. certain techniques, such as using a bit of fingernail on the string, allow the hrokkur player to emphasize different harmonics. although the hrokkur may be heard acoustically, i outfitted the prototype with piezoelectric pickups, both under the strings and on the crankshaft. having two separate pickups allowed berglind to select between the continuous drone of the strings and metallic rhythms of the bike spokes.

you can build your own hrokkur with only a bike, a guitar, and a few extra nuts and bolts!

materials:
a used bike (kid’s bikes are good, adult bikes would probably also work)
a used guitar (acoustics are good, electrics would probably also work) w/ flatwound strings
3/4″ set screw connector
3/4″ floor flange
6x 1/4″ bolts, length depends on wooden base
wooden base (board, stump, log, whatever)

first, remove the handlebars and fork from the frame of the bike.

next, remove the seat. the saddle itself may be discarded, but the saddle post (the pole the saddle is bolted to) should be kept.

all the bikes i’ve taken apart have the same sized saddle post: somewhere between 3/4″ and 1/2″ in diameter. i used a 3/4″ set screw connector (electrical hardware) to connect the saddle post to a 3/4″ floor flange (plumbing hardware). then, i bolted the flange onto a wooden base.

the back wheel acts as the bow to the strings, and you should remove the tire completely. coat the wheel with a generous layer of rosin to improve the tone. the bike will sit upside-down on the saddle post.

take out the middle three strings on the guitar, and replace the high e with the a string. in my experience, the wheel can only make optimal contact with two strings at once. anything else gets in the way.

bolt the guitar to the wooden base. the guitar should be perpendicular to the bike wheel, and the wheel should sit somewhere in the picking area of the strings, with just the right amount of pressure. you will need to calibrate all of the distances and angles for your particular bike and guitar to work together. to my knowledge there is no general way to do this, you just have to go by feel.

for my design, i also implemented two tweaks that required the use of a metal grinder. while this was fun (and sparkly), it isn’t totally necessary, and i wouldn’t recommend it if you’ve never used one before. that being said, these changes are:

cut off the pedal that sits on the inside of the angle with the guitar. for a right handed guitar, this is the left pedal. see the pictures if this is confusing.

cut off the front of the bike altogether, by severing the top and down tubes near the seat tube. while this seems a little extreme, and i didn’t end up doing it for the prototype, it makes the instrument a lot smaller. i’ve been doing this tweak on all my later hrokkurs.

here’s a short video of me playing the prototype without amplification:

and with amplification:

berglind’s debut performance of the hrokkur was totally magical and not to be missed. she is awesome. see 5:34 for some hrokkur fabulousness:

i have been building more hrokkurs for this kid’s ensemble i’m currently in charge of. hrokkurs are perfect for kids, because they provide an easier solution to sound production (versus bowing), while still allowing for tons of variation in technique. more on this later…

i played (a slightly modified version of) an excerpt from the concerto in d minor by bach through it. click here to hear that. i eq’ed it and did some dynamics processing to sweeten it up.

there are also recordings of my own music being played through this thing. here is one:

CAVEAT_EMPTOR by 3_spds

still others will be up soon.

there i am. deliriously. behind me stands the gargantuan pepper-fig tree wherein i installed the songbirds. before me stand two of many figures, each scratching their heads, perusing the various handmade merch and observing speechlessly as an overly sanguine housecat picks a fight with one, and then a pair of magpies.

that’s the split etape ep by creosota, my duo project with adam tinkle, side a, with the high sotiety solo live album, side b.

incidentally, here’s the entire sonic samizdat. that’s the above mentioned etape / high sotiety split, the MUTANT SEAL HOMICIDE (by a. goodwin & me) / set them free (me solo) split, and the live solo album so much for the theory. 8 pcs of each.

we all had to admire this cat’s vim in the face of clear and present danger from above.

meanwhile, due to what now seems like a terribly unfortunate collection of miscalculations, i am doing my best scansorial primate impression among the gargantuan pepper-fig tree’s branches. more on these miscalculations in a moment.

i met a lot of memorable characters that day, including this tawny frogmouth, whom i mistook for part of the gargantuan pepper-fig tree, until he opened his giant yellow eyes to stare at me, disapprovingly.

at this, my first event, i installed ten prefabricated songbirds in the gargantuan pepper-fig tree. i chose to use these little yellow glass votive candle holders instead of trying to collect bottles.

this was probably a bad idea. the candle holders weren’t nearly loud enough to produce feedback among the other nodes. they did, however, look beautiful. and functioned, indoors.

if i could do it all over again, i’d have preempted the crowd and installed these songbirds long before the moment of. it was also probably unwise to have billed the event as a performance, although it certainly had been, albeit one that veered from expectation significantly. that gargantuan pepper-fig tree was a riot to climb though, and people really seemed to dig the various handmade merch and the bizarre ozzy fauna.

later that evening, i participated briefly in a colloquium on experimentalism in art, hosted by critical animals. my contribution was brief because i had been nearly double-booked for an electrofringe event. although my remembered comments were mostly inarticulate, splintered and confusing, my hosts were accommodating and endlessly polite with me. i suspect this is because i was the only american on the panel, and they didn’t want me to bomb them or something.

and then, i did bomb them. aurally. using a custom-built analog synth, a george foreman grill and a quarter pound of minced kangaroo meat. in certain circles, this composition has become somewhat infamous. to this day, i believe it could be the piece of mine with the most legs. in this case, it had two very strong ones.

typically, meat drone is performed with ground chuck, but when i was invited to attempt it with minced ‘roo, i was unable to resist. this version was particularly relentless, because there was barely any accompaniment to the monotonous carnal drone. when finally there was abrupt surcease from the bombardment, i checked the grill and the meat had disappeared. aussies…

still later that evening, i performed a dj set of some of my more accessible music to a crowd of people expecting chiptunes. they were confused, some pleasantly. these two performances comprised part of the so-called electrobinge showcase, which turned out to be intensely fun.

the following morning i lead a workshop on how to build the songbirds from kits. as it turned out, this was a lot of participants’ first time soldering or working with electronics at all. as a result, four hours were not nearly enough time to achieve our stated goals, and an ad hoc workshop occurred the next day, for the verily hardcore / interested / friendly.

finally, i gave a short presentation about my practice, particularly with respect to give me everything, a composition “about” the m-train in brooklyn. it was scattered, and in mono, but these are all things wo men bu neng qiang qiu, no?

thank you estee, thank you cara, thank you james. (for everything.)
thank you ella, thank you julia, thank you yolande. (for similar but slightly different reasons.)
thank you mel, thank you lee. (for entirely different but no less total reasons.)
thank you evan. (for the pictures.)

newcastle was awesome. i had the most incredible time hanging out with friends new and old (ykwya), inhaling greasy vegemite-soaked breakfast sandwiches, and feeling like an utterly spoiled brat. my understanding of australian culture acquired such subtle dimensions as that “jelly wrestling” actually means “jello wrestling” in australian english. i also believe i experienced first hand what a “bogan” is, although the term is so enveloped in shades of cultural differentiation that it’s truly impossible to know definitively. furthermore, from previous experiences on the continent, i had already learned that what we in the states would call “whiskey” is actually australian for “scotch,” and that if one expects american-style “whiskey,” one must actually ask for “bourbon,” which here in the states is a different kettle of fish altogether. this planet truly is a strange and varied place.

i’ve been working on an installation that consists of many simple sound sculptures –songbirds– that react to one another and their environment. each sculpture is a simple robot, equipped with a mechanism for listening and a mechanism for making sound. when a songbird’s microphone picks up a sound louder than a certain threshold, the songbird waits for a brief period of time and then produces a sound in response. as a first run, i made ten of these. on their own, their behavior is quite simple and linear. as a group, some beautifully complex patterns emerge.

the sounding mechanism of a songbird is its solenoid, a small motor that knocks on a glass bottle. each songbird has a unique bottle as its sounding mechanism, and they span various different sizes. these bottles came from my own kitchen. i recognize the video is not high-action, but somehow just listening to the sounds of the sculptures without visual/spatial cues seemed to reduce the dimensions of the artifact too much. to give a sense of how they might actually be experienced in person, i’ve included some close-ups.

n. b. this type of creative work has a solidly defined place in my practice for reasons outside of the sheer sonic and visual enjoyment of the sculptures themselves. i view this type of project as a response to the work of one of my mentors, alvin lucier, whose work often explores emergent phenomena, with an emphasis on acoustics. similarly to much of his work, the process itself is all that is necessary and sufficient for a realization of the piece. this composition is not quite coupled to the sculptures that realize it in this case. in fact, i have seen several other realizations of this composition through to completion before, and it is something of an idee fixe of mine. i can state the concept as a question: what does a purportedly self-organizing network look like when it chokes?

but why this question? self-organizing networks are a popular topic in a variety of disciplines, ranging as far as economics to aesthetics, from philosophy of mind to ecology. my target for criticism has been the randian notion of stability in networks of agents acting in self-interest. while my earlier realizations attempted to take on the rhetoric of objectivism directly (viz. “sanction of the victim,” 2009 and relevant writings on it.), i have decided in some later iterations to let the simplicity of the critique speak for itself. it’s been a few years since i brought this conceptual connection up, but it’s in there, so to speak, and reiterating it seems timely. for another, perhaps more valiant (or foolhardy) attempt at deconstructing the randian network, i highly recommend adam curtis’ 2011 documentary “all watched over by machines of loving grace.”

but let all of that slip out of your head for a moment. the real driving force behind this thing for me wasn’t an attempt to take down rand, and when i’d drawn my first sketches of this, curtis’ documentary hadn’t even been released yet. the staunchly non-academic truth to my intentions is that i enjoy watching it. there is an almost fatherly pride i get when i watch automata that i’ve made behave in unanticipated ways. this feeling is especially present for physical realizations, as opposed to software. blame the hormones. i’m not going so far as to call these plastic, spastic robots my children, but it’s definitely somewhere between looking at baby pictures and regarding a well-trained pet.

building the birds

now that i’ve made my own flesh crawl, here are some pictures and notes from the making-of:

after designing and etching the pcbs, the next step was soldering the components. in my pcbs, i etched the values of the components with copper tracing.

next came drilling out the chassis. i used 4″ x 4″ clear plastic boxes from the container store, which turned out to be exceptionally fragile, despite how cool they look.

problem.

i naively treated the first few boxes as i would a metal chasis: drilling out the holes with my 1/2″ bit. this turned out to be a great way to make tons of plastic confetti. eventually i adjusted my technique to start with a smaller bit, and used a grinding bit to ream out the holes until they fit.

a solution!

i ended up adding an indicator led to my boards, last minute. this turned out to be a good idea.

opening the idea

one thing i neglected to mention earlier in this post is that i’d been invited to newcastle, australia to participate in the electrofringe 2011 festival. among other things, a major component of my activities down under involved these songbirds. the sculptures would be installed in a park, and i would bring supplies to teach other participants how to build them. more on the specifics of the festival will come in a later post. right now, i’d like to show you how i made the updated pcbs:

i exposed the photosensitized boards with one of those curly “eco-friendly” lights. incidentally, no one tells you that these contain high amounts of mercury and are therefore in fact, eco-unfriendly. i exposed for a period of 5 minutes at a distance of 1 foot.

i etched a few of these boards in ferric chloride, which is what i’d used for the last batch. this process became not only time-consuming and inaccurate, but also expensive and generally unpleasant.

to check on their progress, i would shine a light through the bottom of the clear plastic tank. eventually the boards’ details came into view. after some time, however, so much copper was suspended in the solution that it became opaque, making this impossible. also, the etching process slowed to a crawl.

i took a hint from this article and made a new etching solution of muriatic acid and hydrogen peroxide. i also bought a cheap air-pump for a fish tank. this sped up the process considerably. i’ve stuck with this re-useable (!!) etchant for all future projects, and i swear by it.

1. connect the output of the 741 (pin 6) to the cold lead of c2!
2. connect the collector of q1 to ground!
3. the values of c3 and c4 got switched!

in the meantime, i’ve made corrections on the boards with some extra holes and a few jumpers. this is a suitable fix for me right now, since the installation will be going up in less than a month.

this reminded me of my love of accidents. here are some pictures of boards i was etching that became art along the way, by accident:

songbird b’s are simple electromechanical devices that are capable of both listening to sounds and making them. to listen to sounds, they use an electret microphone element, and a basic op-amp circuit that measures approximate sound pressure level (SPL). when the measured SPL reaches a certain threshold, the songbird triggers a logic based one-shot that lasts for a few seconds.
here’s a riveting video of me testing this logic circuit:

this logic pulse causes a solenoid motor — the kind of motor doorbells use — to hit a resonant object after a short delay. a single instance of these responsive agents could be a bit dull, but my hunch is that in large groups they exhibit interesting behaviors. in fact, i’m pretty sure of it! a very long time ago, i did this with computers on a local area network (LAN) and it was awesome.

to test if the prototype would be capable of responding to others of its kind, i attempted to induce feedback with a single unit, pointing its mic at the surface it would strike. this resulted in a near-regular, metronomic activation.

the schematic for this circuit is quite simple. click here to take a look at it. i owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the venerable forrest m mims III, whose circuit this is largely based on. come to think of it, i owe an enormous debt of gratitude to a lot of people… maybe we’ll see a litany of thank-you’s at some point on this blog.

once i figured out my circuit, i had to work out how the songbirds would sing. this took a lot of thinking, and i went through numerous designs before settling on my solenoid idea. i’m quite enamored of the non-electronic sounds this makes, although demos that use the same ‘brain’ to control a vco / vcf section were rather promising too.

an interesting problem i encountered was that while metal objects sound amazing, the solenoid failed to recoil reliably after striking them because the knocker becomes magnetized. if it was totally essential, i could have used non-magnetic metal, or come up with an array of solutions involving other mechanisms, but instead i just worked around it and tried other materials. i settled on glass jars. they sound and look great! actually, with these solenoids, i found i had to keep the striking surface just far enough away so the knocker could knock it well, but not so far that it couldn’t recoil again. finding this sweet spot involved a lot of testing and nudging while the epoxy set.

i cut the flanges off a metal chunk which i think came out of a synth i dumpstered and disemboweled ages ago.

DIY ETCHING
somewhere around this point i started looking into pcb fabrication techniques. perfboard has served me well for my brief and humble electronics career, but the prospect of making, say, a dozen of these in the same manner as the prototype made my head spin. i looked at a few board houses, and made a few cad layouts, and eventually decided that for my time and money (& aren’t they the same thing anyway? thanks, capitalism!), it made more sense to etch my own pcbs. i did some research (and asking) and ultimately went with the positive phototransfer method.

now, this particular blog entry is not the place for a complete tutorial on fabricating pcbs at home. there will very likely be a future post (hopefully in video form) that will outline my preferred method in much more detail, once i have a little more experience. but, i’ll go through the basics of the fabrication method i used, complete with some photos i took along the way. it was really fun, and not too difficult! i only got very superficial chemical burns on one fingertip. i owe an enormous debt of gratitude to cooper baker for the sage wisdom and moral support when things went awry.

i started by making my 2-layer board layout into a 1-layer board layout. i know it’s possible to do multilayer boards at home (why wouldn’t it be?) but for my maiden voyage i decided to go with something slightly less intimidating. i went through several iterations of 1-layer board layout, too, messing with trace thicknesses, tolerances, and resolutions. this was my first one:

there are a few things wrong here i’d like to point out. first, the text is going to turn out backwards, since we’re printing on the bottom of the circuit board, not the top. think of it as an x-ray view of your circuit. second, the tracings are way too skinny. you should try to make them as fat as possible, and use a ground-plane. this will help you save on etchant, and will be more forgiving of errors. these days, if you look at a modern pcb, all the tracings are super tiny. this may seem like it uses less copper, but really all that excess copper ends up in the etchant, and while the etchant’s pH can be neutralized, it’s the dissolved copper that causes all the negative environmental effects. so use a ground plane! third, the image itself is only 150 dpi. to get a decent transfer, you should go no lower resolution than 600 dpi.

now that’s a little better! i also made my typeface a little more civilized. the text is backwards, but the components are forwards. think about it for a second and this will make sense. we’ll be making transparencies with these, and we’ll want the surface you printed on to directly touch the board.

since i don’t have a printer, i went to kinkos, chatted up a particularly sympathetic employee (turns out she’d done some aquatint etching in the past) and got some free transparency paper. i printed the layout, careful to make sure it stayed the same size, with one of those giant lazerjet copiers, with the darkness turned all the way up.

to hold the transparency to the pre-sensitized photofabrication boards, i used a pane of glass. the first two exposures i tried failed miserably. i used sunlight, and exposed them for about 10 minutes. this was overkill by a long shot, and overexposed my boards into oblivion. i’ve since made them into artwork.

instead of sunlight, i had the best luck with one of those 13W curly eco-friendly fluorescent bulbs, placed about 1 foot above the transparency, exposing for 5 minutes. by the end of my fabrication run, i was erring on the side of 4.5 minutes. i prepared a 5 / 1 solution of water to developer, and made a bath. some people reccomend lightly brushing the boards as they develop. i do not. all i did was wiggle them a little (with gloves on, of course!) under the solution, and in about 20 seconds my artwork appeared. immediately after all the blank spots were washed away, i dipped the boards in cold water. i tried rinsing the first couple with water from the tap, but this turned out to be a bad idea as it was too forceful.

test patch success! i was so stoked beneath my possibly overkill respirator.

i ended up making 11 boards. with my two perfboard prototypes, that makes a baker’s dozen. i may try to make more for the installation, time permitting.

next, i prepared my etching tank. i actually used the same plastic tank as i did for the developer. it’s nothing fancy- no bubbles, no heater, no sparging unit. just a transparent plastic tank. DON’T USE ANYTHING METAL AT THIS PART OF THE PROCESS! i used ferric chloride for my etchant, which is some nasty stuff. i did my etching outside, on my porch, and used gloves, a respirator, and plastic tongs. i should have had goggles on but i couldn’t find them. shame on me! use goggles!

…ok enough moral panic for the moment. i warmed the etchant up in a bath of hot water for a few minutes. apparently this reduces etching time, making your edges come out sharper. etching took about 45 minutes, give or take ten. i just kept shining a light through the bottom of the tank to see where the copper had been eaten away. try stirring the ferric chloride lightly, to move around the ‘hot spots’ so you get a more evenly distributed reaction.

if you do a batch like i did, not all the boards will be finished at the same time. carefully taking the boards out as they finish, dip them in a bath of fresh water. this will neutralize the acid and they should be safe to touch once you rinse the water off. i was super-cautious and rinsed them a few times. remember to wash your hands. here’s what they looked like when i took them out:

next step, drill 9,000 holes! thanks, cooper, for letting me borrow your drill press. i used #60 carbide drill tips.

now i’m heating up my soldering iron. i’ll post more pics / video documentation as these songbirds take shape…

Creosota is an electro-folk project featuring Adam Tinkle on guitar and vocals, and Joe Mariglio on laptop & contact mics. Their live sound often incorporates complex rhythms, bluesy folk idioms, field recordings, and massive vocal textures. Skittering glitch-hop beats co-mingle with fingerpicked guitar and the sounds of distant (sometimes not-so-distant) trains. They play their own compositions as well as reinterpreting songs old and new. Adam and Joe have extremely diverse musical backgrounds, and their shifting, thoughtful aesthetic reflects this. This album is Creosota’s debut, and already their performances have begun to move into new territories. There is ample room for further exploration.

This recording was performed live in the Acoustics Lab in San Diego, CA on August 15th. It was sculpted, mixed and mastered at Tanglezone Farm, in the workshop of Joe Mariglio and in the Conrad Prebys Music Center, UCSD. It was truly a labor of love.

To this end, Adam Tinkle and I have come out with designs for a very inexpensive mbira, or “thumb piano”, which can be easily amplified and otherwise extended to include all sorts of other sound-making possibilities. While the prototype demonstrates something very similar to a traditional (albeit non-Western) instrument, we see this as a platform on which to extend into further sonic zaniness and fun.

An mbira (kalimba, marímbula, thumb-piano, etc) is a lamellophone, a class of instruments that make sound via an array of plucked metal tongues. By “plucked metal tongue”, I mean something similar to the tab on an opened soda can, although in general these instruments are much more expressive. They have been widely used in African and Caribbean musics for uncountably many centuries. Pilfering the idea for our own ends, we decided to figure out if we could build one for less than $10 per unit. We succeeded! You can too:

Parts list :

NB these are Home Depot prices, and, with all due respect to them, you may find cheaper hardware at your local shop. We certainly did. Also, smaller stores will let you try out the hardware to make sure everything fits correctly, which is absolutely essential when buying nuts & bolts.

14-terminal ground bar – about $3.00 each
2 carriage bolts – about $1.00 each
4 hex nuts – about $0.35 each
2 wing nuts – about $0.50 each
some sort of wood for the body – we spent $1 or so
bobby pins – $1.00 for a pack of 60

I don’t have photo documentation of each step, but I trust you can use your imagination. Also, a side view of the finished product might help you see the big picture:

If you’d like to make your own, the trickiest part is making the bridge, where the tongues are coupled to the rest of the instrument (we used pieces of wood as a body). The best material for this bridge is an electrical ground bar. A 14-terminal bar can be had from Home Despot for a mere $3 or so. This will give you 12 slots into which you may insert the tines, or anything else your heart desires (we were thinking springs might be nice . Sitting in each terminal is a screw which clamps onto whatever you put into it. Take out the first and last screws, and carefully drill out those holes. Make sure these holes are straight, or you’ll have a tough time getting the body fastened to the bridge.

There are two schools of thought about how to get a snug fit with a bolt. The one I subscribe to -after some particularly difficult experiences- is that you should use the materials themselves to measure where to put the holes. Sure, take a measurement, and mark up your piece of wood, but in the end it comes down to the angle your drill took as it bored the holes. Therefore, after measuring, I took to clamping the bar onto the piece of wood with two c-clamps and drilling into both pieces in one fell swoop. This will not save you if you take it at an angle, so be very careful! I’m probably laboring this point a bit too much…

Then slide the bolts through the end terminals, and thread a hex nut around the bottom of each, clamping them to the bar. You can use whatever length of bolt you’d like- we went for longer ones because we wanted tongues to vibrate with a lot of action. Use 1/4″ bolts, or whatever will match your drill bit.

Next, you want to thread two more hex nuts onto the bolts. These will press down onto the body while allowing as much distance from the tines as you would like. Try to make them somewhat even, although you can correct for any error once you have the board on there.

Now it’s time to fasten the bridge onto the body. Use the two wingnuts for these last two points. This will let you manually re-tighten the hardware, which you will definitely need to do at some point. Tighten the top nuts onto the body as well, so everything fits snugly. You may experience some weirdness if your drill came through at an angle. I had no problems here that a little elbow grease couldn’t solve.

Now, for the tongues. Our pictured mbira actually uses poly-coated metal rake tines, which we cut off a $20 rake. This will drive up the cost of your mbira, although not by very much, since you can get a lot of tines out of a single rake. However, after a little experimenting, we found that bobby pins actually sounded better! A pack of these can be had for a song. And although our rake tines are coated in poly, some of them still are a bit sharp, so honestly for the kids we’re most likely going to stick with bobby pins.

Another drawback to rake tines- they’re pretty tough to get off the rake!

And that’s basically it! For amplification, I soldered a 1/4″ jack onto a piezo element and epoxied it to the board. I am strongly considering making magnetic pickups so we can avoid amplifying contact noise, but then again sometimes contact noise is a good thing. Also, 4,000 turns of wire per pickup, at one pickup per tine, and twelve pickups per mbira… that’s a lot of turns of wire. If we went with something like that, it would likely be done with a servo motor / microcontroller setup for automation purposes. I’m looking into it and will report back!

Enjoy the noise! ^_^

Clearly, I was not out to win any beauty contests. The GUI is fully functional, however, with progress bars that track the position in the files they represent, which can be manually scrubbed with a mouse click. Every parameter can also be assigned to MIDI input, and presets (both of GUI values and MIDI connections) may be saved and loaded. It runs on both Swing (Linux / Windoze) and Cocoa (MacOS) gui schemes, and has been tested on recent as well as slightly-less recent builds of SC 3.4. It is extremely playable.

You may view / download the source here.

SONIC SHREDDER consists of 3 main components:

Together with comprehensive MIDI support and preset management, the SONIC SHREDDER is capable of a nauseating universe of extreme sonic oblivion.

Master Levels:

these default to 0, which is muted. there is one fader for each module, and one fader (SUM) for the total output of the SONIC SHREDDER. these may be assigned to midi controllers and their values stored in presets.

SHRED (grains):

SHATTER (filterbank):

there are 8 of these filters, arranged in parallel. after each filtering stage, there is a granulation stage, where the probability of a grain passing through is determined by the “prob” parameter. SHATTER uses a hanning window for its grains. w(n) = 0.5 ( 1-cos(2πn / N-1)) . the master control of “del” scales all of the individual delay times in the filterbank.

SPIT (waveshaper):

a waveshaper produces distortion by indexing into the phase of a transfer function. the SPIT module uses three independently tuneable sinusoids as its transfer functions. these are applied in parallel, and then summed together. NB – in v0.2 these outputs are spatialized in the stereo field. see the commented out portion of the SPIT synthdef below for more details.

these layers are summed, and their output is scaled by the “SPIT” master level at the bottom left of the panel.

Presets & Midi:

the SONIC SHREDDER is capable of storing preset scenes which contain all fader values, all file paths, and all midi routing data. these are stored as legal supercollider code, to allow for easy manual editing and debugging.

saving & loading:

to save a preset, simply click the “save” button, locate a directory, and name the file in the dialog. to load a preset, click the “load” button, locate a previously saved preset, and open it. to make your changes apply to the panel, hit the “load” button again, which will now read “apply”.

no paths / load paths:

sometimes, during playback, changing the path of the soundfiles or the envelope file will cause stress to the synthesis server, and could cause a crash. this phenomenon usually occurs only during important performances. to prevent the preset from loading these paths, click the “no paths” button. it will toggle into a “load paths” button. to safely load a new soundfile or envelope, turn off the SHRED module you wish to modify before making changes. if you would like to make changes to the envelope file path, you must turn off all SHRED modules. the SPIT and SHATTER modules will not be affected.

midi learn mode:

to control a fader with a midi controller, simply select the desired fader (not the number box or label!) and hit the “L” key on your keyboard (shift is not necessary.) then wiggle the desired controller. the fader should move with the controller now. you must hit the “L” key once more before moving any other controller or selecting any other fader.
the controller you use must send midi cc messages and cannot be a key or button. panel buttons cannot be linked to midi devices at this time. you may assign multiple faders to one controller, but assigning multiple controllers to one fader may cause errors. to be safe, i would not recommend doing either, but whatever…

really the best way to learn how this stuff works is by playing with it. make sure your speakers or headphones are loud enough for you to enjoy it for reals. don’t be a wuss.

if you have questions, bug reports, or comments, please contact me @ joe (dot) mariglio (at) gmail (dot) com
if you have feature requests, be prepared to give me some kind of compensation. :$ feel free to distribute this software. i only ask that you include my pithy comments and documentation contained in this header. also, if you haven’t yet, you should check out my website for more software, circuit schematics, free music, and other oddities.

I have already recorded a lot with this instrument, and cannot wait to take it on tour. I’m using a korg nanokontrol usb fader box on it, and it runs amazingly smoothly on the new linux machine I just built, as well as on my older mbp. As of this writing I am working on a new album which almost solely uses this instrument to repurpose sounds from the MOLTEN LAVA EYEBALL FIEND archives.

Happy shredding! ^_^

Bovina Clovis is a siren of the south. She possesses the most intoxicatingly beautiful voice in the world. Her udder-tentacles lure her prey into a trusting stupor, as she digests them alive. Her massive wingspan does not provide her with flight, rather, they allow her to vibrate the earth, giving her dual powers of creation and destruction. To keep from destroying all of southern California, she must feed…

Frequently.

The EYEBALL FRIENDS soon found themselves the high leaders of a new congregation. Their masses consist of sacrifices and vigils, with the sole purpose of keeping Miss Clovis satisfied. She demands these brutal orgies, and if the FIENDS don’t deliver, she will level pretty much everything from Orange County to the Mexican border.

As she is still incomplete, she currently consists of a fearsome body, the first of many heads, and a 12′ wingspan. Her wings are made from aluminum siding, and the edges have been ground down to permit bowing. Each wing has a piezoelectric pickup, and one wing has an extra piezoelectric element for use as a speaker. Many times she sings all by herself, through buzzing, gut shaking feedback. The EYEBALL FRIENDS will never sound the same again.

The FIENDS have yet to debut this beauty, but their first show with her is scheduled as part of BRAIN BOMB 2011- at TIL2 on October 14th. The FIENDS have already recorded two live studio albums with her.

The first of these – ARE YOU RENTING?? – is a celebration of sex and death cut from a larger, 3 hour session recorded at Anthony Davis’ suburban homestead.

The second, more atmospheric PRISON JELLY features sparse, complex improvisations, bowed trash, and a circuit-bent radio.

Massive amounts of other material exists in addition to this. While none of these studio recordings are overdubbed or edited in any way, they are culled from literally days of material. These recordings –and a few other rarities– have been released in physical form in a limited edition run of 55 CDRs, which have been distributed for free throughout Berlin, Amsterdam, Lucerne, and Paris. The FIENDS toiled long and hard over these artifacts. Each one features unique, hand-made cover art.

Miss Clovis will eventually sport a rack of amplified udder-tentacles, made from heater coils, with tubes which dispense strawberry milk.