Mechanosensation

...is my new website.

I'll will update this blog from time to time but the majority of my activity will be conducted through this new address.

Bandcamp releases, surround sound field recordings and a some black and white photography are just a few things you will find there.

Could not help but move the first time I heard this. You'll hopefully have the same issue.

I instantly gravitated toward Nick Huggins on the day of Art Not Apart as he too had a sonic exhibition for the festival, his more on performance based than my installation piece Phonosphere.

We had a chat about our respective projects and it became clear we both had a passion for listening, recording and all things sound related. Nick explained the unrecognizable part of his setup which was both and  conceptualized and produced by himself which I found inspiring and thought provoking.

It was the six knobs on top of the mixer that caught my eye. They control the pitch of six cassette players that are feeding 6 passive and discrete speakers on the steps in the photo. He had a handful of cassettes with different sounds and loops on them, all being feed to the discrete speakers, all with a pitch control you could speed up or slow down. Fantastic. Did I mention their power was daisy chained?

Here's a little info about Nick from two bright lakes which is the record label that released his two albums. Enjoy.

Nick Huggins is a guy who mucks around with sound for very many hours of the day and night, even when sleeping. He's produced records for Mick Turner, Khancoban, Oscar + Martin, Seagull, Hazel Brown, Hello Satellites, Otouto, Psuche, Whitley and Kid Sam among others. He is 1/3 of Touch Typist, fond of chocolate and has just released his sophomore album Five Lights.

Recording some underwater action using a pair of JrF Hydrophones

I promised a while back to upload my 5.1 surround field recordings.

It is complete but tumblr has  an issue with sound files over 10meg.

One take.

So the photographs I posted recently document an installation Tim Duck and I completed in October 2010.

We wanted something interactive that involved sound and we came up with a mix of a classic game along with some trigger pads.

I believe MAX/MSP or SuperCollider would've been the best and most flexible choice for the software driving our creation but as our coding skills are not top notch we opted for Ableton Live. It was flexible enough and gave us a starting point.

Our first idea was to reverse engineer a normal PC keyboard to drive Ableton.

I took an old keyboard apart and started playing around with the contacts. We realised that it would still work even with metres of wire extension so that was our first milestone, it will work running metres of cabling.

After a while we began to realise that a keyboard deciphers its commands via a matrix, over 100 input commands on the keyboard are funnelled through the 26 contacts on the little PCB.

I have no background in electronic engineering so we opted for this piece of kit.

http://www.ultimarc.com/ipac1.html

It gives you 56 discrete inputs and simplified things for us.

An installation Tim Duck and I did a few years ago.