*36C3 preroll music*
Herald: But thanks that you all are here. Actually, since it's all teardown moment,
still, we have enough, we have lots of people here. Interesting. This is as well
an interesting talk because it's Helen Leigh who's going to present this.
Actually, give us an overview actually about what hackers, you know, in music
meant actually in the history. So to give an overview, if I understood this well,
she gives certain examples. And I think she's gonna kick this a little bit further
because she's going to talk a little bit about her current work and future
objectives. So I would fasten seat belts, I would say. Yes. Helen Leigh. Give her a
warm applause.
*applause*
Helen: Hello? Yep. So I'm Helen. This is if you want to follow my stuff or download
any of my things that I mentioned in the talk about GitHub and various plots of my
work on Twitter. So here we go. OK. Right. I am going to talk to you today about
we're gonna give you a story. I'm gonna give you a story about how a group of
music hackers in the 1940s changed the face of music technology forever and how
they didn't know anything by what they were doing. But they still manage to do
some incredibly cool things by just disregarding and being really awesome
hardware hackers. I'm also gonna give you an overview of some of the coolest
projects coming out of London and Berlin at the moment. So I've been... I'm living
in Berlin at the moment, but I was active in the music hacking scene in London for a
long time as well. So I'm going to show you some cool projects. And before I start
off on my story and cool projects I'm going to just introduce myself. I am a
creative technologist, which is a ridiculous buzzword. But people like to
put you in a box. But I'm basically a massive nerd who really likes arty stuff,
so I'd like to smash them together. My favorite things to smash together are
electronics and hardware and with music technologies. And so with that in mind, I
make a lot of strange musical instrument creations, usually very experimental in
form. I'll show you some of that as well. This is one of my experimental
instruments. I make sonic psycho sculpture creatures and I've taken them on
residencies in London, Shenzen and Copenhagen. And I just really like
experimenting with what a musical instrument looks like. And not so much
what it sounds like. I mean, I am into other people's noise art. But for me, I
like my instruments to sound melodic. But yeah, form, I'm very interested in
experimenting with. I also really like at the moment - this is made out of brass.
And I've made a lot of stuff with different metals. But at the moment, I'm
on a big soft circuit kick. And so I'm experimenting with electronic embroidery
and soft robotics to make kind of kinetic, sculptural, squishy creature things. And
I'll show you some of that later, too. And obviously, this doesn't pay my rent,
shockingly. So I also do some product design and a lot of curriculum based
things, remember, I'm a writer as well. So this is a product that I designed. That's
actually my hand on the box. Very exciting. And it's a wearable instrument
for children sold by PIMORONI and Adafruit and et cetera. And it's a DIY wearable
gesture based instrument for children to learn how to code with. And I designed
that with Imogen Heap. And I'll tell you about that cool project later. But that's
something I do. And I also do a lot of writing. This is a still from one of my
books I wrote recently. Last year it came out, one called The Crafty Kid's Guide to
DIY Electronics, where I teach basic electronics through the medium of paper
craft, origami, sewing and kind of like DIY robotics as well. I also write for
Hackaday. I've written for blah blah blah, doesn't matter. I write words for money
sometimes. Anyway, that's me. I am going to tell you as one of my favorite stories
of music, tech history. I'm going to start off here with this rather pretentious
quote from a rather pretentious man who I still kind of love is a guy called John
Cage, who most people know him for his experimental compositions and his many
and varied writings on on the subject of what is sound and what a sound artist.
But he was also pretty early on a hardware hacker. He made experimental instruments.
Actually, one of his first famous pieces was him like smashing up a piano and
changing that. So he was a composer, but he was also an experimental hardware
artist. I mean, he said this. There is no noise. There is only sound. And the reason
I put this quote up there is to kind of make you... remind you that all music is
made up. Okay. All instruments are inventions. The violin wasn't a violin
until probably the 13th century when various instruments that came before it
converged and someone using new techniques, new tools. And it starts and
it keeps revolving through the ages. Right. And I think you could think of an
instrument as a - as a specific thing, but it's really not. We've been messing around
with science since we've been humans, basically, and deter with compositions.
You might think of classical music mainstays like Stravinsky, Strauss or
Debussy as, as these kind of like boring establishment figures, but actually in the
day they were seen as avant garde. People walked out of their performances. There
were hit pieces about them in the mails. You know, the Daily Mail of the time. So
basically, anything that sounds strange to you now or something that's experimental
to us could well have an influence in a long reaching way. So, yes, here we are.
Oh, I'm going to tell you. But my favorite conspiracy theory as well. So even down to
the note A, 440 Hertz, middle A. And it's - It was not even - it was not the letter.
Sorry. It was not 440 Hertz until the 1950s when a group of dudes met up in one
room in London. And then everybody signed this agreement saying, OK, now an A is 440
Hertz. Before that, a flute in Italy might sound different to a flute in France.
You'd have like this small tonal variations. So it wasn't until yeah the
1950s that it became actually the letter A. There's a wonderful series of
conspiracy theories around this that actually that they chose 440 Hertz because
it's a method of population mind control and there are alternative websites out
there, now you can literally go and if you search for like uhm 440 Hertz
conspiracies, there are websites that are campaigning like groups that are
campaigning for it to be changed for the whole of modern music to be a to be
changed. There's one at 432. There's one at 438. And if you're in the 438 camp,
because there are opposing camps as well. So if you're in the 438 camp, you're in
luck because someone's made a music adjustor. OK, so you can take your track
that you've done and you can put it into a converter and it will convert all of your
music into 438. So you can do that if you like. And there's even a radical fringe
group calling for the middle A to be 538, which is absolutely insane. But there we
are, I love it. And so if you ever want to go down a conspiracy theory YouTube black
hole, which you probably will do, we're all at camp, uh congress, not camp. You
can look at that. But basically my point here is that music is all made up.
Instruments are all inventions. So, you know, there are no rules. I'm gonna take
you through em - one of the paths, one of the many paths of music history and music
hacking. And we're going to look at one piece of hacked technology and how people
who played with that and did things with it that they weren't supposed to do
changed modern history, modern music production. This is the magnetic tape
recorder. It's a lovely device. And it was used popularized in World War 2 by the
Nazis who used it to chop up propaganda and so on. And after the World War, after
the World War and the BBC took on it, took it on themselves to try and develop a
version of this. So this is a relatively modern technology. In the 40s and 50s,
it started becoming becoming popular and it was used for real to real broadcasting,
right. Before this, it was grammophones. But a bunch of - so they were used in
music studios and they were relatively expensive. As it became cheaper, a bunch
of music hackers saw its potential to do something more than just line it up. So
these hackers got their hands on a bunch of these and a bunch of these magnetic
tape recorders. And as people want to do with technology that they get their hands
on it. They started to fuck with it in a new and very exciting ways. And what they
did is they they as a movement in Paris and then early 1940s called musique
concrète, which was the first group of people who were doing this. Aside from one
lonely guy in Egypt as well. But there was like the epicenter of this was - is in
Paris. And what you do is you see the the actual tape there. You use a razor blade
to cut it. And then you can, for example, flip it over, tape it back together, and
then you've got one piece that's backwards. Right. OK. And using that
technique, I'll show you how actually you this is it.
*sounds playing* OK, so not only can you chop things up and
turn them around, you can speed them up and slow them down. This gives you - this
seems - so, basically, if you do it faster, it will give you a higher tone.
And if you do it slower, if you slow it down, it will be lower. OK. We all know
this kind of instinctually now. But back then, this was fellow. This was completely
revolutionary. You could make sounds that were not existing in nature. Take, for
example, the plucking of a violin string, okay, you pluck a violin string. And it
comes on quick. It's like boom. And then if you let it die off, there's a "laaa".
So what we call that in music is a sharp attack on a long delay. And that's how a
lot of musical instruments or natural science will work. OK. They will fade off,
OK. But using this technology, you could switch it around. So it had the
opposite effect. So like "uooom" the long attack and a short delay. So you could
create sounds that are not found in nature now, which is extraordinary. And at the
same time, there was the advent of something called field recording, which
was you could go outside instead of having to record in a studio. You could have a
physical piece of equipment that you could carry around with you and a microphone, so
you could go and record sounds outside. Found sound is what we call that. Then you
could take it back to the studio, chop it up with a scalpel, sellotape it back
together, rerecord it, and you could create... This is just you know, it's just
a huge, vast new set of tools that you can work with as somebody who's making music.
Now the first people doing this were, as I say, these French guys in Paris
and in musique concrète. And they were doing it. And due to modern music,
digital preservation techniques, you can hear these, the sounds they were making on
YouTube. You can spend some time and listen to that. And I won't lie, they
sound pretty awful. Nobody wants to listen to that. I mean, unless you're a true
enthusiast. But it's not it's not about the music they were making, is about the
techniques that they were creating, their experimentation sounded terrible but
actually was incredibly influential. We use sampling now as just an ordinary
thing, but this was the technology behind it. It really came to a head in the 1960s
when Beatle - the Beatles were the first people to use this technique on "Tomorrow
Never Knows". Now, normally, well, I would play this, but when I did, at a talk
similar to this at the Hackaday Super Conference, they uhm they pulled my
livestream because there was a 10 second snippet of the Beatles. So I've decided
not to risk it today. But you can look up "Tomorrow Never Knows" and you can hear
these "woauum, woauum, woauum" kind of sounds. And that's actually flipped.
That's just flipped sounds that the - all of the Beatles brought in sounds from
their home. They flipped it around, speeded up and slowed it down. There's a
famous like very high pitched "hiehiehiehiehie" sound in that song and
it's just Paul McCartney laughing and they've manipulated it using sticky tape
and scalpels. Anyway, so that was the beginning of these new production
techniques, right? You can use these in modern music, you know, when you're in
your Ableton or your Logic or whatever. You know, those are just standard
features. But this was the beginning of it. And it's incredibly influential. I could
follow it down this path. But I'm actually going to take this and
leave them to go on with modern mainstream production. And I'm going to talk about
this woman instead. Who was one of my favorite things about hacker culture is
the way that we learn from each other and the way that we rev off of each other's
work. And so I'm gonna go slightly sideways and talk about this artist and
engineer. Her name is Daphne Oram, and who's heard of Daphne Oram? All right.
Like ten of you. Which is more than usual, actually, to be honest. So Daphne Oram is
- everyone should know her name and that's why I never shut up about her. She was a
musician and physicist, an electronics engineer who was unfortunate enough to be
a woman. And was - has a pretty tragic work history. But she... she's one of the
iconic figures of early electronic music. She should be as well-known as any of the
- as Moog or whatever. But anyway, so she's a trained musician and she got a job
at the BBC queuing up these reel to reel magnetic tape recorders, which is actually
a pretty big deal at the time for women as well. So she would. She went on a training
course to Paris and - just studio recording techniques. You know, standard
corporate training. Right. And while she was there I believe she met some of the
people behind the musique concrète. And she was basically and they showed her what
they were doing. And it totally blew her mind. She was like, oh, my God, I will
take this back to the BBC. It's gonna be so cool. I'm going to revolutionize
everything. It's gonna be awesome. She took it like that. And predictably enough,
everyone was like, no, go back to pressing buttons. So she did. But she also would
run around at the BBC late at night after hours stealing bits of equipment from
other people's studios and wheeling them into her own studio. And she would
experiment with all these musique concrète methods. And she was an electronics
person, as well, and she was one of the first people in the world to make purely
electronic music, because she was one of the first instances of someone who
recorded her oscilloscope and then started using that for compositional purposes as
well. And she was doing this for maybe five, six, seven years. And at the end of
that, she started to get some interest. She managed finally to convince somebody
to give her a commission to create some incidental music for a piece of - for a
show. And erm and it was a success. Also people hated it. Of course. But enough
people wanted her to repeat it that eventually the BBC gave her her own studio
which is like absolutely, you know, out of the question for someone in the fifties,
for a woman in the 50s. And so she she was starting to make this but she erm
unfortunately at this point she got the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which is one of
the most iconic sound design workshops and studios in the whole history of music
technology. So she starts this workshop, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but a year
later she leaves to start her own artists practice because they - they said she said
they wanted my ideas and they wanted my work but they didn't want me. So she had
to leave her life's work. And she was largely erased, actually, from everything
that she did, even though she founded this iconic this absolutely iconic workshop.
And she went off and created. She didn't have a sad life after that. She - she went
off and created em, this wild synthesiser, which is in the London Science Museum. And
I was like instead of she she loved looking at wave forms of music. So she
thought she would use watercolor to draw the wave forms and then have a synthesizer
interpret those wave forms. And that's called the Oramics Machine is like
absolutely wild. You can look that up on the Internet as well. It's cool to look
at. So, yeah, she's becoming a bit more popular now because of the work of some of
the guys at the Radiophonic Workshop who still exist. Some of the old guys who go
around telling cool stories about them. And but also because of the woman she
helped bring in who stayed after she left. And she's quite famous now because of
something I'll show you. It's this lady. And this is Delia Derbyshire, who's head
of Delia Derbyshire. A lot more of you. I thought so. Now, Delia Derbyshire again
the same? She's got a maths and music degree. She couldn't get a job, but she
ended up basically pestering them into letting her do some interning at the
Radiophonic Workshop and eventually got a job there. And then she was the arranger
and made the instrumentation for this. Now I'm going to play this for you. Before I
do, I want you to think about the fact that at the time every sound had to be
physically cut and sticky taped together, every sing-. And there's no multi-track
recorders back then either. OK. So you have to. It's an absolutely enormous
process of recording the sounds, stretching the sound, cutting the sounds,
sticking it back together, making on a reel, recording that onto a separate reel.
Then you've got this and then you add more sounds and then you have like several
tapes that you have to condense into each other without multi-track technology. OK.
They're literally on different machines shouting "Go" at each other. And that's
how they recharged multi-track. But she was very blasé about it. It was kind of amusing
because it seems ridiculous to me now to be able to compose a piece of music
like that, like a jigsaw puzzle. But she just shrugged and said, well,
seemed to work. I find that kind of charming but yes. So that's. Oh, no. Why didn't it play?
*low volume static noise*
Oh, no. Huh, goddamned. Well I'm gonna play it for you anyway.
Oh, it's playing! Oh good, it just took a minute.
*Doctor Who Theme playing*
[over the music] No theremin. No synthesizers existed. This was literally
just tapes. And she also made her own instruments so she [inaudible], including
my favourite which is called the wopulator(?). And that just a good name
Yeah, so uhm, they actually used a lot of electronic engineering gear in their work.
Anyway, we know how this goes. And I don't want to get another copyright violation.
*Doctor Who Theme stops* So let's move on. I did actually want to
play one of her own songs, so that's her commercial work. But she was also an
electronic experimental musician of her own and on her own accord. And she I think
you kind of forget that music in the 50s and 60s actually kind of was wild as well.
Let's see if we... *Music playing*
[talking over music] This is one of her tracks from the 60s.
Kind of a banger. [making sounds]
You might even recognize this track, because someone did sample it.
Die Antwoord literally just rapped over the top of that and then released it as a
track. She made this for a science fiction show that was based on an Asimov story and
this remains, but the Asimov story that it was made for has been deleted from the BBC
archives, which I find to be an absolute tragedy. I would love to watch that. If
you uhm if you flip it back, the robotic sound is singing "praise be to the
master". *Music stops*
Thank you, Daphne. And so that's the that's my story of the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop. But I wanted to leave you with a quote from one of the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop engineers. Unfortunately unnamed in the documentary that I watched and I
just thought this was kind of a cute sentiment because they were making things
up. They weren't - they weren't the experts in the room. They didn't know what
they couldn't do. So they just basically managed to mess around with stuff and
ended up with something really special and really cool and something that was just
iconic. You know, some of the biggest electronic music acts in the world today,
still say that the work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was one of the big
influences in life as well. So. So, yeah, that's the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. And I
think it's very important that we allow for ridiculousness in technology and we
allow for ugly noises and we allow for stupid things that don't fully - you don't
really see what they're for. Like the power of them allowing for experimentation
that isn't very successful at first or doesn't sound successful. The idea is
really important. Yeah. So outsiders, hooray. That was a golden age. We've got
the invention of a new technology and what resulted in democratization. You know, the
availability of a new technology to a reasonable number of people led to this
uhm to this amazing sea change in the way that people made music, made digital music
and analog back then. But, you know, the way that we make music was changed by
these experimenters. It was definitely a golden age for - for new techniques. But I
think that we're currently in a golden age for people who are working with
experimental instruments and experimental sound in general. And I think that we. So
we've got loads and loads of really exciting new technologies that are
available. We've got cheap microcontrollers. We've we can make our
own PCBs. We can make our own synthesizers. We can access people, which
is which is really crucial. I mean, think about Daphne. She didn't learn about
musique concrète and she didn't find the BBC Radiophonic Workshop until she had a
spark of an idea from somebody else. So really, it is learning tools, learning
type, you know, gaining access to tools, learning new techniques and learning and
being inspired by other people is really, really critical for anything to to really
change and to really and to happen. But I think that at the moment we've been
really, really cool, accessible new technologies that more and more people are
learning how to use and more and more are becoming much simpler as well. And and
crucially, people are more accessible. So people share, particularly in our
community, people share their knowledge and very freely. And you don't have to be
in the same room to do this. I know a bunch of people are listening on the
livestream right now. So you don't have to be here to learn about things.
And you don't have to be in the room to lend it - to attend a workshop with
somebody. Right. There's these wonderful YouTube tutorials now for sharing
information. Niche communities are just way more accessible through online places.
And we've got an incredible community and abundance as well. So this is I mean, I
shouldn't have put this slide in here but it doesn't matter. Uhm so this is this is
one of my old hacker spaces. It's Machines Room. In uhm in London. And it was where -
where the music, technology, one of the places where the music tech community in
London was centered. And they did some, it was there on the London hackerspace, but
we did a lot of things. But there's a community called the hackoustic that I was
involved with. And we used to do a lot of events there. I'm saying that the reason I
put this slide down was just just to show that hacker spaces and maker spaces often
have some kind of music technology partnerships and those kind of central
spaces where you can share things and share knowledge and get inspired by each
other's work and also hold events is really, really crucial. Actually, I do
know why I put this slide in. So, so this slide the - this this was a wonderful
space for uhm for three years. And then the landlord raised the rent four times
and this amazing community of artists and designers and music hackers was removed,
and at the same time, the London hackspace moved from central London to west London
and a bunch of other hacker spaces and fab labs closed as well just because of how
expensive the center of London had had become. And there's just as a direct
result of that, I moved to Berlin. So like this is there by, by, uhm by allowing this
kind of gentrification of our hackerspaces we actually do destroy community as much
as we can create community online as well. Like this. So this is uhm this is an
example of awesome online community. This is, um, YouTube uhm video from someone
from the London music tech hacker scene and probably the most famous person from
it. And it's a guy called Sam who goes by "Look Mum No Computer" on the Internet.
And he he's an electronic engineer and general purpose weirdo. Which is why I
like him. And this is one of his creations. He made a Furby synth, which is
as horrific as you imagine, if not more so. So don't look that up. I mean, do look
that up. But it is genuinely be prepared to not have a nice time. But he doesn't
just show his instruments. He doesn't just perform with them. He he does really
awesome electronics teardowns as well. So I've learned a bunch of stuff from
watching his videos and looking at actually how he's done them. And that's
something that's really exciting. I mean, like maybe 20 years ago, I wouldn't have
had access to this kind of knowledge. I just would have I probably wouldn't have
even known that I like this kind of stuff, you know, wouldn't have been exposed to
it. And then I certainly wouldn't... You know, I've been going down my my local pub
saying, hey, he wants to work on, uh, on a weird Furby instrument with me. And they'd
be like, well, no. So it's kind of nice to be able to show your weird passions with
the people on the Internet. And then, of course, we have, we're at one of these.
This is me and my friend Phoenix. We've done a fair bit of music tech hacking
together. And this is actually the British version of Congress, EMF camp. I guess
it's the version of Chaos camp, actually. But so yeah, EMF camp, which is actually
in 2020 this year. It's a yes. It's really cool small hacker festival or but these
kind of spaces and these kind of events really allow. I mean, I've learned so much
just by being here the last couple of days. And every time we do this, we should
cherish and we should cherish the hacker spaces and the events. And we should also
support people like Sam, who makes his living through Patreon and on YouTube, you
know, so by supporting maker spaces and events and also by supporting individual
people who are putting the effort in to create and share work, I think and we can
cherish this community. OK. Onto the final bit. I'm going to show you some - some of
the cool projects that I've been working on with other people. But the reason I've
chosen the ones that I'm showing you is because they are also using some of my
favorite ways that you can hack on instruments. So I figured I'd show you a
project, but also show you how to make, you know, how you can have a go at it. So
recently I've lived in London and Berlin, and one of my favorite things to do is
when I'm in a space is to make an instrument in the context of two people's
work, two or more people's work. I always find like my work is always way better if
I'm collaborating with somebody else. So you know what they do and what I do
smushed together to create something that's better than either of us could have
done on our own. And I think this is a good example if it will play and this is
one of my first sonic soul circuits sculpture creatures.
*plucking sounds* This started off as a hack just overnight
hack with my composer friend Andrew Hockey and Drew Fustini from Oshpark and myself,
obviously, and we worked together overnight to create this. This is a
circuit sculpture. If you don't know what a circuit sculpture is, it's basically uhm
instead of putting your circuit inside of a box, all of the parts or the key parts
of it are shown and are actually celebrated as art in their own light. And
so that's what a circuit sculpture is. And there's a couple of wonderful people and
there is this guy called Mohit(?) who makes really beautiful things. He's living
in San Francisco. And then this guy called Giri(?), who is in Prague, I want to say.
And they make really, really awesome, tiny, neat things. But I I'm not tiny and
neat, so I make big, massive and messy things. So this is the first one I made.
It was really interesting to me. I really like capacitive touch as a technology and
it's can be unreliable, but I find it kind of really fun to work with. And it's very
intuitive for a musician. And then that led to me developing a second creature.
And I'm really inspired by kind of utopian science fiction. And I wanted to make a
series of creatures that inhabited the same world and sung when you touch them.
So this was the second in the series. This is a more traditional instrument. I mean,
obviously, it's still weird. It's more traditional in the - past one, the second
one, the first one was generative in some way, like semi generative. And this one is
more like one note per limb with two modes of modulation. This is a bass.
*synth bass sound playing* "wobb wobb wobb".
*Helen chuckles* So that's my base creature, which I'm
actually developing for a real musician now and a woman, amazing bassist called
Ayse Hassan who is the basis for the Savages and just was on tour with the
Pixies and I'm going to - I'm making her a stage presence one. And so she's going to
be able to play it, but that's gonna be more generation based as well. But it's
kind of interesting to to try and create something that in its functionality is
very traditional, but in its form is really weird. And that's kind of fun to
play with. But now my latest one is another creature. But this is kind of like
an abstract sensicle pod. It's gonna be human sized. And each of the limbs will
pay a different part of the choral arrangement. And then there's like some
kind of like sunlight feature at the top where you can modulate it by touching the
copper rods. I've actually made a prototype, which you can listen to. So
this is this is the latest version of one of the limbs of the tentacle, which I made
and it just made it for the form. But then everybody seems to really like cuddling
it. It's very comforting. So I decided to make it purr after I'd finished
prototyping. If you want to listen to my purring tentacle afterwards, you can. It
does sometimes work, but I should say actually. Hello. So this is it. This is,
um. This is machine embroidered conductive thread so that - that is able then to
detect capacity. That's a capacitive touch sensor essentially - It's a sensicle. And
so yeah you can see that afterwards if you want. It mostly works. I made it yesterday
so that's quite fine. But again, you know, I would not have been able to create the
intricate sounds without the help of my composer friend, and I would not have been
able you know this and I would not been able to get the implementation that I
wanted onto the beagleboard whithout erm, Drew. And so it's, it's, it's, it's really
nice to kind of like sit together and mash up your mash up your skills.
*bottles falling over* Now, these all use one of these and this
is another one of my instruments. This is a wearable, flexible PCB, it's gonna be a
vocoder, but it's not finished yet. But. But the reason I'm showing you that is
because that's the sensor that I use. This is a they call it the trill. It's
essentially like if anybody viewed any of you who used capacitive touch before, you
probably used an MPR121 sensor. This is like an MPR121 sensor ++. It's much more..
they've got... a) it's got like 20 something pins, which is wild and it's way
more sensitive as well. So I find it really really great. So if anybody's doing
stuff with cap touch and they're having some problems with it: a) make sure you
ground it and b) have a go on that trail. It's like 10 euros. I think that, that
sensor. And it is done by bela. You can see one of their boards there. Now I'm
gonna do a whole slide about bela and Fan Girl about them because they're my
favorite technology at the moment to use for embedded systems, for embedded
instruments. And this is like the size, this is this big. It is based on the
pocket beagle, which is the size of a small Altoids tin. So it's very, very
small. But it runs, it runs, it's a full Linux computer and is really, really
awesome. Super, super responsive, super low latency, which is really important
when you're creating instruments. But also the cool thing is it runs this. This is
PureData. It's a visual programing language for sound creation. A lot of
artists and sound designers and music creators, they use this already. You
might. This is very similar to something called Max, actually made by the same guy.
But this one's open source. Yeah. So and so that's bela and PureData. Definitely
worth checking out if you're interested in instrument design. The reason the bela is
special is because, because of the latency, but also because no other... So
you can't get a microcontroller that will run PureData except for the Raspberry Pi
does. But the latency on the Raspberry Pi is like meeh. So I would always suggest if
you're doing something. The bela and PureData is a nice combo. OK. That's that
one. Then the other project I wanted to talk to you briefly about is, is this is
Ariana Grande, who you probably don't know who she is, but anyone under the age of 13
certainly will. And here she is demoing and is called MI MU glove.
*music playing* [talking over music]
It's a gesture control. I say yes, gesture control. And she's controlling, she's
doing looping. She's doing effects using gestures. Obviously, gestures, various
gestures. Thank you, Ariana. *music stops*
So that's that's the that's the. This is what she's using here. And this is coming
out of London. About of the music tech company called MI MU, that was originated
by Imogen Heap, if you know her. And I saw the Ariana video and something I didn't
mention is I actually do quite a lot of teaching as well. And when I saw that
Ariana video, I just thought I was like, oh, my God, if I showed this to a 12 year
old girl and told them we could make one, they were going to lose their mind. So
these cost like five grand, though. So I don't think I could get one of these in
the classroom. So I just messaged Imogen and asked her if I could make a children's
version. And so I did. She said yes. And she - we, this is this is a wonderful
piece of technology called the micro:bit. And it's a DIY, it's like my first
microcontroller that is made by the BBC. It's like 10 pounds. It's very, very
cheap. It doesn't do a lot. But what it does, it does very well and very simply.
And I was able to make an approximation of a five thousand dollar glove with a ten
dollar microcontroller, which is nice. That's what the core of the product that I
made is actually in. But. I haven't got the time to talk to you about that. That's
my leather robot unicorn. I gesture control, but I can't tell you about that.
This is another artist, got no time for that. So we're getting onto this last one.
So basically I was able to - with one bridge, one micro:bit and a little bit of
code to get it to work on professional music software. And this is a musician
called Bishi who's really awesome and this is her using my ten dollar hack.
*music playing* [talking over music]
To do very similar things. To the 5000 dollar. And of course, that's not stadium
level. Ariana claimed they couldn't use that on tour. But it's it was a fun
project that we hacked together. *music stops*
And that is that's my time. I have done all of it, by the way. All of this, how I
did that. And that's all on my GitHub. All of the code. If you've already got a
micro:bit, you can do, you can do it yourself or you can get the kits for like
30 bucks. It's not very expensive. So all that's on my GitHub along with some weird
factory signs of things. And you can follow along on on my weird electronic
adventures on my Twitter. I'm pretty reactive. So say hi to me and I'll be
hanging around here if you want to listen to my tentacle. So the end, okay.
*applause*
Herald: Helen Leigh, woo. Thank you, Helen, for his fantastic presentation. I'm
wondering actually, how are we gonna play that thing there? What it's like. I had a
questions here. No. Yes. Yes. Online, of course. They are far more, more speedy
than we are. Shoot! Signal Angel: So the question from the
Internet is: Have you ever considered creating music without human interaction?
Helen: Yes. *laughs*
Her: Okay then, next one. Hel: Thank you. Good night. No, I mean,
I'm personally I'm a very tactile person and so I like creating instruments that
you... that you stroke that are affectionate almost and kind. I like
giving the things that I create some kind of persona and that you interact with
them. However, a lot of people use... there's a lot people doing really
interesting things with generative, non- human interactive art. In fact, the
composer friend that I was talking about, Andrew Hockey, who's done a lovely... He's
haked a musical marble run and that is just automated. I mean, when the marbles
go down, the marble run. It will trigger generative signs, which is really, really
cool. There's lots of people doing it. But for me personally, I just I know. I like.
I like touching the objects that I make. You know, I'm the kind of strange person
who walks around a craft store with a multimeter kind of like touching things
and figuring out if they're conductive, like adequately conductive.
Her: You're measuring out... Hel: Yeah. So for example, in fabric
stores, there might be something that's conductive. That's not actually built as
conductive. Or I'll often go to art stores and craft stores or architectural supply
stores. And you can find you know, you don't have to go to Conrad. You can go to
Modulor with your multimeter. If I just like you can, you know see if it's
conductive or it's not. *laughs*
Herold: We believe you. I'm just imagining you there.
Helen: Oh, yeah. No, it's... Herold: At a flea market.
Helen: I've had some strange looks. *laughing*
Herold: That question here from number two please here in the front.
Mic 2: Have you also created instruments that actually work with the physicality of
the object that you have built instead of triggering some processing?
Helen: So actually, you mean... Mic 2: Like what if the tentacle itself,
the sound it produces would be amplified and somehow that, the base of the
processing of the actual... Helen: Oh, you mean more acoustic. Yeah.
Actually when the tentacle is done it will have some kind of physical feedback loop
in it that will be reactive to its uhm, to its space, to its personal space even as
well. So actually the cool thing about capacitive touch technology is if you get
the thresholding right, you can not just sense touch. You can sense proximity and
that kind of also very cool how many people are in the room as well. So you can
get it to react quite... not uniformly, but you can get it to react quite nicely
to its environment and also the way that people are manipulating it as
well. And you can also code some cool things into that as well. So basically
based on, you know, like the number of touches. How often people have played with
it and, you know, and then and how people have played with it. And get that type of
feedback in to the music that it's making in a generative fashion. There's lots of
cool things that I want to do with this next sculpture. But yeah
*laughs* Mic 2: Thanks.
Herold: I'm so sad. I really have to spoil it here. Really... we have to shut this now.
And I would like you to ask do to talk to her personally. Here next to the stage.
Thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thank you. And leave for this fantastic
presentation on.
*applause*
*36c3 postroll music*
Subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2021. Join, and help us!