Specialising and exhibiting

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Week1-Expanded Studio Practice for Twenty-First Century Sound Artists

The Victorian Synthesizer is an ongoing project to build a musical instrument boasting the kinds of parts and capabilities traditional synthesizers have (oscillators, filters, amplitude envelopes, modulation) but using techniques known to the Victorians. It is this collision of contemporary concepts with outmoded means that creates the Victorian synthesizer as an imagined historical reject. Generally, the Victorian Synthesizer needs to be electro-mechanical rather than electronic, manual rather than voltage control is typically required, and some synthesis units will present especial challenges. Oscillators constructed through feeding back the output from amplifiers are, for example, post-Victorian inventions (c.1920 by Barkhausen and Kurz).

Oliver Lodge (1898, Victorian) had patented moving coil methods usable for sound transmission in our epoch of interest, hacking loudspeakers seems an appropriate strategy for The Victorian Synthesizer.

We made the Victorian Synthesiser in the first of our class and I was thinking if I could repeat making it layering out like a pyramid it would be fun. Repetition is a kind of artistic logic, which was quoted by Andy Warhol.

It was really interesting to test out lots of different speakers speaking sonically in a fixed space. JC was putting rice in the speaker, which made it stream out was really funny.

Then we were talking a little bit about the sonic knowledges:(keywords)

Potentiometer

Electrolytic Capacitor

Resistor

LED-Light Emitting Diode

Signal Diode

Battery red+ black-

Socket

PCB

Trimmers

IC

“I’ve been accused of starting the first electronic art movement,” Ghazala told us back in 2010. “If that’s true, that was better than the other things I could’ve done.” Clad entirely in purple, a sort of modular J. Mascis, Ghazala would show us his boyhood home in suburban Cincinnati—where the chance-driven sound generating technique was born in the late 1960s—before we holed up at his Anti-Theory Workshop on the other side of town. There, he played our flesh (seriously) and an array of other manipulated consumer electronics, all blipping and blorping to the rush of simply not knowing what you’re going to get when you bend, say, a children’s toy radio. Stay tuned for the premiere of Sound Builders season two right here on Motherboard.