BlackBox

I was watching TechTV’s Big Thinkers today and they had on Tod Machover of MIT’s Media Lab. He was talking about this new project he had which was designed to help kids play and compose music. One of the cool items that they had on were the BeatBugs. These things rock! I want one so bad! But, unfortunately no one makes them yet.

So, what is so cool about the BeatBugs? First, they are incredibly easy to use. Tap them and they remember the rhythm you just tapped out and play it back. Not only that you can play over it with more rhythms. They also have a built-in speaker, but I would of course replace that with an audio out to feed into a mixer. In addition they have these sensitive feelers for even more individuated input. Very cool! Now here’s the other cool part, you can network multiple bugs together to compose, using others’ rhythms and tweaking, playing over, etc.

This fits in with my personal philosophy of using interesting things to make cool music.

Circuit Bending is another unique way of using existing electronics in ways they may not have been meant to use. This includes modifying (or modding) things like Speak ‘n Spells, Teddy Ruxpins, and the like to output their sound to a regular audio-jack directly, or in actually putting controls onto or into the device to control how it makes noise, er sound.

One of the things I love about Circuit Bending is that you can do pretty much whatever you want with whatever you want. Want to take a “Cow Says Moo” and be able to force it to say that phrase over and over whenever you want. Or be able to modify the sound - “bend” it to change pitch or time-stretch it? Chances are you can do it with a little tinkering and playing.

One performer I’ve seen use this stuff is Not Breathing. He falls into what I would call experimental electronica, along the same vein as Matmos and Jay Lesser. He recently moved back to Tucson from Seattle, we are very lucky to have so many electronica artists who call Tucson home (I’ll hit some of them up later for mini-interviews). Bottom line, there are tons of cool toys out there, some you buy and some you make, you make the choice ;-). Maybe it’s time for me to borrow my friend Jim’s soldering iron and start playing :-).