learning to listen.

There have been two tasks that have popped up as a side adventure in training ourselves to comprehend noise, each time we have donned earplugs for a few minutes to allow us to hear a space with "new ears."

The first was a listening walk on wednesday:
the set task was to follow a defined route and descibe the sounds you encounter on the way. they had to be arranged in a way that could be interpreted in preformance. the whole aural plethora we subject our ears to is a major task to notate. with my notes scale mostly consisting of jolted scribles describing new things I could hear, when I heard them and when I stopped hearing them.

In stark contrast on the thursday we went into a lab at auckland university's archetecture department that was sound insulated, a cube soft inside walls floor ceiling covered with inward pointing wedges of foam designed to test the sound reflection/ absorbtion properties of objects and materials. we sat there suspended by a wire frame floor listening to the sound of silence in the dark. after a few minutes Phil turned on the lights and had a breif talk, its surprisingly hard to listen to someone without all the ambient noises and echos, probably like how people brought up with vinyl records miss the hiss and pops. in someways the interesting part of sound is the imperfections and little variances, its a odd experience being in a space where any noise is evident but the brain has trouble isolating it from the silence.

lead in task for "Sound Building"

Over the last few days we've been playing with boxes making instruments. Tuesday we did a small task following instructions to make noises with peices of paper the task was a improviesed version of a preformance. and then started on the task of making instruments using a box as the base and amplification chamber, I

wednesday we soldered up contact microphones,

A surprisingly awesome amount of noise is picked up with the addition of a contact microphone to the boxes, a tinny little string twang becomes a heavier thrash metal noise. more like the gutair its aspiring to be.
The design of mine is currently going through a gender identity crisis with a indecisive form slowly emerging. a fraying line between simplicity and the urge to just tack stuff.

The primary aspect I was looking at was a simple glass bottle, with different ridge textures and patterns and thicknesses. Which was aiming to result in a more ceramic type noise than the stock cardboard box like a electric guido as kick ass as that sounds. unfortunately the bottle is already optimised and the box dosen't add much in the way of significant amplification.

I built a small striker design. a hinge with cotton bud sticks glued to with a elastic band compressing it to the surface when you pull it up and release it makes a noise

i've managed tofind ou the fragility of the contact microphones diapham. when I attempted to move the mic to nearer where the sound was propagating.

heres a short video of one of my tinkers

Side Project: Ringflash

as it currently stands as of 25th of april i have worked out the wiring and need to build the body structure to mount the internals in
the flashes are triggered opticaly using a slave flash trigger i bought of trademe i could have soldered one myself but i got lazy and the unit is able to be smaller than i would have ended up buiding

this project started part way into the prosthesis brief and somewhat got delayed due to bct workload sickness and having to work out how to build it.
the point of a ringflash is that it throws a the light on the same plane as the lens and the light bounces back to the camera with little shadow detail giving a soft flat appearance and often rings in the pupil

The inital starting point was 20ish disposable cameras the were then dissasmbled and later modified to reduce the size
In the current arangement only 14 fit power coming from 4 AA batteries. a photo receptor diode (when it actually works) allows the flash to be triggered by the cameras flash and it also has a button to manualy discharge the flashes.
. this picture was taken on one of my first tests, in futher tests two wouldn't fire assumedly due to the trigger wiring after rewiring none do atm but should be easy to fix 3 which have a red led dont seem to charge fully or at all futher tests are nessary.