Been doing a lot of sitting and thinking. Watching lots of interviews and talks with Peter Blasser of Ciat Lonbarde, thinking about wonky rhythms, life rhythms, Henri Lefevbres’ Rhythmanalysis, polyhythms, silly absurd bepop jazz (Sur l’autoroute – Miles Davis, from the soundtrack of Elevator to the Gallows. It’s just balls to the wall, especially when that walking bass comes in), Ciat Lonbarde have a wonky drum machine that utilises odd numbers of transistors on each LFO to construct square/rectangle based waveforms that induce noise and unpredictable, unbalanced waveforms. These can be clocked independantly and thus create lush, complex polyrhythms.

Theres an old (supremely simple) square oscillator that I constructed using an LM358 IC, it’s been lying around unused in my box of unfinished circuits for a few years simply because it was so unstable. A combination of shoddy design, recycled capacitors (~45 year old caps), a poor understanding of the differences and purposes of split rail and single rail supplies and floating GNDs and also it being a difficult chip to use (I think because of some requirement for input biasing, still unsure) is what caused this instability. But now, I’m recycling that circuit because it creates some incredibly interesting groups of pulses at LFO rates – perfect for triggering oscillators in a wonky drum machine of my own. The main problem I have now is modifying it’s frequency range whilst this time KEEPING A HOLD of the wonk.

It’s very interesting to see how desires change over time. I can now build perfectly useable square wave oscillators using a different opamp more suited to the purpose, and I’m hunting again for the wonk. I’m just glad I soldered down this wonky circuit all those years ago and didnt just breadboard it, to be ripped out once it failed. Its really teaching me about the impotance of failure and also the importance of doing and finishing, even if there are imperfections within the end product.

I think that capturing the process of designing the aforementioned synthesiser may be a more evocative and comedic work than actually utilising the finished synth. I also have my doubts as to whether I can engineer a working synth within the short time that I have available to me. This is a classic woe that I find myself experiencing when it comes to uni work. Setting myself big goals at the last minute and then struggling to fulfill them, thus creating subpar work that is not representitave of my abilities. This is an organisational issue, but I can work around it by being thoughtful and measured about the products that I intend to deliver. For example; this assignment I initially planned to create a synthesiser and perform a piece with it, and now I have backtracked to simply making a piece about making a synthesiser.

My concept is to hit record (on some stereo mic pair) only when I’m about to test some part of my circuit. This means that I’ll be capturing all of the tiny victories and the tiny problem solving moments and all of the disappointing moments where nothing works despite my contrived plans.

I then plan on splicing these all together to create a rollercoaster compilation of all of the mini victories and failures that occur when attemtping to construct a working circuit.

The only logical road to go down for my sound work is to build a rudimentary synthesiser and perform using that. This will not be my first synthesiser build, but may be my first permanent build that won’t be held together purely by blind luck. I’ve also been putting a lot of thought into playability, how one controls a synthesiser, this sort of thing. Ciat Lonbarde (run by Peter Blasser) has been a great influence in identifying simple and intuitive ways to control synthesisers.

In terms of my research proposal, I intent to propose to build a synthesiser. It’ll comprise of a few oscillators being triggered by other oscillators, all independant of eachother to enable polyrhythmic functionality. Filters and envelopes would be an additional bliss, and oscillation intermodulation would be the tin hat on it. Dont even get me started on stereo…….

But envelopes and filters are things that I’m still working out – lots of work is still to be done, and we’ll see how successful I am given the limited time and resources. Component cost is a thorn in my side; I’m about to drop £30 on components in the hopes that they’ll enable me to experiment more, and get a working model. We’ll see. Thats pretty much two nights out; perhaps I should have chosen coding, instead. That would enable more money to be spent on drink.

There is a certain aspect of experimentation that comes alongside dealing with the chaotic and sometimes unpredictable environments that are present when dealing with pure voltages, and this lends a hand regarding innovation. Has every analogue audio device been invented? Of course not, people will continue to innovate and create new FX units and new sounding devices (sounding is being used here as a verb).

Makoto Oshiro, who was a recent visiting practitioner, creates a variety of electronic sounding-devices but the one I’m focusing on here is the Kachi Kachi. It uses relays triggered by oscillators to create acoustic sounds, it can be triggered into audio rate and thus create tones, or triggered slower for rhythms. His 30 minute piece (linked below) is a great example of using minimal technology to create powerful and dynamic works. It’s inspiring, and aides my drive to build more and more circuits. It also teaches me that I should be soldering and finalising all of my electronics, as even the most simple things that seem trivial should be given the chance to be performed with.

Eirik Brandal is an artist who has been on my radar for many months now. He creates sound sculptures using DIY electronics, combining occularcentrist ideologies with sound art to make beautifully functional works. These inspire me greatly, and they also relate heavily to my essay subject which is starting to now take shape. I’m writing about the benifits of learning electronics, which could be argued to be somewhat of an obsolete medium. Digital technology is getting more powerful and readily available every year and soon there will be no audible difference between it and analogue, but yet I feel that people will still gravitate towards it. The inherent physicality that exists with analogue, coupled with the ease of constructing simple things creates a multifaceted medium for not just sound-making but also spatial composition.

Brandals work is simple and ingenious, meticulous and precise with mathematical beauty derived from its sheer functionality. The interactivity within instruments such as ‘Composition #11’ is uncomplicated but effective, it doesn’t seem contrived. ES #17 hints at communication and collaboration with machines and toys with notions of sentience. He creates endlessly exciting sculptures that seem to display a childish glee at building better and better toys. But these aren’t the dreams of an overexcitable toddler, these are nuanced works that have been weighted and balanced with deliberate thoughtfulness. He is one example of an artist who innovates through analogue means, creating devices that simply have no digital counterpart. He shows that there is indeed room to innovate, and that electronics is a still evolving field of study that has not yet been entirely mapped out.

I don’t wish to make this about analogue vs digital, but I see it as less of a competition of better or worse, and more as an indication of where my time should be spent. Incidentally, my mind is made up and not much will be able to dissuade me from my interest in circuit design rather than software development, but I see this project as a means to discuss and justify my decision.

It seems like there is plenty of potential essay subjects when it comes to audio electronics.

• 1) Planned obselescence, small companies making electronics are more likely to promote fixing things rather than scrapping and moving on.
• 2)Anything about how much our choice of tools dictate the sound of our work.
• 3) Being creative within rigid constraints.
• 4) designing circuits is often bad for the environment and unsustainable – components break down over time and need to be replaced, the overwhelming majority of electronics are not recycled.
• 5) Is it a good thing that we understand nothing about the innerworkings of our equipment? Is that a priviledge?
• 6) Cutting out the middleman – design the equipment that you would like to use, at wholesale cost.

Although pretty much all of these topics relate directly to my own practise as an aspiring circuit designer, I think some of these are more related to experienced electronic engineers. For example, no.6: years and maybe decades of experience are needed to design and create electronics up to specifications that can be used in a professional audio capacity. No.5 also requires years of experience, and relates to fixing electronics which is a particularly hard field to get into.

I think a topic more suited to my abilities would focus more on the aspect of learning electronics, touching upon areas such as ‘why learn electronics during a digital age’, ‘the difficulties of learning electronics when fewer and fewer experts exist’, ‘ensuring that there are enough technicians to maintain the vintage equipment that is so fetishised within the field of audio’, ‘the benifits of learning to fail, and how electronics teaches that’.

Soldering as a method of procrastination sort of got out of hand, and I ended up building a functional tremolo unit by piecing together circuit topographies from the datasheets of op-amps and using my existing knowledge of electronics. I’ve been meaning to really dig my teeth into electronics, but I’ve been constrained by funds, my glasses being broken, and also a lack of drive to work. This time round, I’ve got glasses, drive, and finally bought some higher quality more audio-suited op-amps. I breadboarded a very simple circuit of my own designing, and am currently in the process of soldering it onto stripboard. It comprises firstly an active attenuator, in the form of one half of a TL072 configured as an inverting amplifier with variable gain below 1, and secondly there is a ‘square’ wave (it’s rather wonky, and I borrowed the oscilloscope from uni to view my waveforms in hopes of figuring out how to sculpt the wave in a better manner – this is one of the problems im working on) oscillator that controls the gain of the amp via a homemade vactrol.

It barely functions, is intermittently noisy, but has lit the spark in me for further development. It also filters audio slightly as the gain rolls off. This is due (I think) to very small inbuilt capacitors within the TL072 interacting with feedback resistors to make a filter when resistance is low (or high….?). Regardless, it has many quirks and I happen to like those a lot, it has inspired me to create interesting, unpredictable circuits and instruments.

I have lofty dreams of building many things. A combo amp with numerous cones of wildly varying sizes, each with its own gain control. This will be implimented for reamping and filtering by using the relative gain of the cones to create a different frequency response. I would also like to build some very crappy distortion pedals, a super simple polyphonic synthesiser also appeals greatly to me.

With regards to my tremolo, I have ideas about how to fix its various problems. I think the noise may be coming from power supply and PCB layout; I plan on using a TLE2426 chip to engineer a buffered virtual ground as opposed to my existing solution (which is prone to voltage drift… I think?) that consists of a voltage divider with corresponding capacitors to support any excessive current draw. With regards to PCB layout, I still need to do some research on how to mitigate inductance-based interferance, but I know that it is a problem that can easily occur. Shielding the circuit from RF interferance is also a priority – I will be using old tins, which I can ground (if made of conductive metal).

I’ve been doing plenty of work on my essay for the CIiSA unit, mostly doing my best to narrow down my topic to something more specific, and gather sources that aide in the construction of my essay. I reckon the actual writing, 2.5-3k words, won’t take me in excess of 3 or 4 days but the planning and conceptual belt-sanding will take a real good chunk of time.

I felt unmotivated with this unit towards the start of the essay planning process, so I decided to write my essay on something that would make me slightly more interested and more likely to see it through to the end. Some writings on the current post-punk scene in south London seemed to be a good place to start as I foster a lot of interest in it, attending plenty of gigs that fall within the genre. I’ve spent the past ~3 weeks gathering sources and struggling very hard with creating a title and an essay that says something meaningful about this scene. I’ve ascertained that it’s on its last legs, really, and that it has somewhat of a diversity problem with a slew of groups populated mostly by white middle class men, and I also came to the conclusion that despite me and many others trying to claim that the scene is inherently political the actual truth is more complex and nuanced. I soon became sluggish with my advances; I had plenty of articles to reference, some ethnography papers on other genres that I could potentially reference, but I had nothing to say. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to talk about. I toyed with ethnography, just straight up documentary, a critique, a prediction, but I still felt as though none of these things excited me enough to study them.

I began to solder, as a form of procrastination.

Having had my grades back from the gallery 46 show, I think that it would be wise to talk briefly about how the results matched up to my expectations. My overall grade was a B-; this was slightly surprising as I felt as though my work was more successful than the grade given, but after reading the general feedback it began to make more sense. A lack of grounding my work in the existing canon of sound arts work coupled with poor time management resulted in the docking of a couple of grade points. This seems to be a regular occurrence within my submissions and I need to alter my process to buck the trend. More advanced planning seems to be the key here – although that’s funny as I’m behind on current assignment planning.

Got a working square wave oscillator soldered onto a board now – it’s output seems to be quite hot, but that can be solved later down the line if needs be. Now ideally I would build a VCF and then a triangle wave oscillator to slowly modulate the VCF. And then do it all again 2 more times.

Once the VCF and triangle oscillator are operational, replicating them should not be difficult – maybe an afternoons work? I hope to get the filter down today, the triangle oscillator can wait until tomorrow.

[written 4 days before gallery install, meant to be posted then. how funny it is, seeing myself thinking that I can realistically design and make a VCF and triangle wave oscillator in that time, when it took every ounce of my being to build just two square wave oscillators in time]