Noisemaker Workshop: Starting Thursday April 16th

Bleep!  Bloop!

For the next few Thursdays at 7:30 pm, Elliot will be leading a workshop on sound hacking from the ground up.  We’ll mostly focus on building our own gear, but we’ll also borrow a couple tricks from the glitch/bender tradition.

April 16th, we’ll start off by scratch-building a mess of raw sound sources. After that, we’ll work on smoothing out the rough edges and trying to make this stuff more musical. (Or you could go for more cacophonous.  It’s up to you.)  After the first two or three weeks, I’m open to suggestions.  Let’s see where we can take
this.

This workshop series is going to involve soldering, (ab)use of digital CMOS chips for analog ends, a smidgen of electronics knowledge provided), and enough noise to ensure that you leave with a good solid headache.

Bring $5.00 to cover the cost of materials for April 16th.

Bring around 3-6 volts’ worth of batteries if you’d like to leave the space with something powered up.  Two to four AA, AAA, C, or D cells will do.  Three if you’re using rechargeables.

Also, if you’ve got a breadboard and would like to use it, bring that too.  Otherwise, you’re going to be doing it dead-bug style like me.

Come on, feel the noise!

Delia Derbyshire: Hacker Goddess and Electronic Music Guru (1937-2001)

Delia Derbyshire at work

It seems fitting on Ada Lovelace day for our group of intrepid hackers to celebrate the life and achievements of Delia Derbyshire.  Born in Coventry in 1937, she has become a quintessential hacker  goddess and one of the early founders of electronic music.  Unsung for many years because of the BBC policy of not crediting by name the Radiophonic Workshop contributors, who were seen as simple “sound effects” people, her work was largely unrecognized for many years by the larger electronic music community.  Famous largely now for her efforts on the instantly-recognizable title music for the “Dr. Who’ television show, her work spanned a wide range of electronic genres, reaching its real heights in moody, ambient soundtracks for a range of BBC shows- the best of which were science fiction.

What many do not realize is how primitive the tools used to compose this music were- often using only  banks of single-tone audio frequency generators and reel-to-reel tape decks.  Delia would carefully cut and paste beat loops of tones and found sounds, and then painstakingly beat-match the loops on banks of recorders, recording the result on other decks.  By doing this over and over, she could get remarkably intricate layered compositions.  It is this spirit of remarkable innovation and craftwork that has has endeared her to many electronic musicians, including Sonic Boom (Peter Kember,) who was collaborating with her during the 1990s until her death, long after she had left the BBC and electronic music.

Inspiration can be found in online collections of her work, and in plays ad performances about her life and times.  With a new generation of electronic musicians strongly influenced by the DIY/hacker ethic, it is not surprising to see a significant rise in interest in Delia Derbyshire and her works.  Her influence will continue to be long lived, and like Ada herself, Delia Derbyshire has proven to be a visionary pathbreaker and an inspiration to visionaries everywhere.


Learn how to make Soundscapes with Python and Arduino

SoundscapeA soundscape is “an environment of sound (or sonic environment) with emphasis on the way it is perceived and understood by the individual, or by a society” (Barry Truax, *Handbook for Acoustic Ecology*). Soundscapes can include natural sounds (like animal noises or weather) and/or environmental sounds that result from human activities.

Microcontrollers connected to both external sensors and computers (by serial or wireless communication) offer a wonderful and accessible platform to generate complex and interactive soundscapes. Light, motion, distance, and temperature sensors, along with large buttons (in this case crafted with piezoelectric devices inserted into felt-crafted designs) and computer-monitored variables such as time of day, rate of online activity, season, etc. can add mountains of additional texture to a soundscape.

Using Arduino and a soundscape package for Python called Boodler (see Boodler.org), we will explore and discuss the potential for highly personalized soundscapes that incorporate microcontrollers. The speaker, Todd Fine, has only very recently begun playing with Boodler, but he is interested in introducing it to others interested in soundscapes, Python, or Arduino.

When: Thursday,  March 26, 2009  @ 7:00 pm
Where: HacDC Headquarters
Cost: Free and Open to the Public

DNA Cryptography

Diagram showing how DNA cryptography can work

For those folks that saw the Biomolecular Cryptology talk at This article in Technology Review talks about how DNA can be used to also encode data.  This approach leverages some deep properties of DNA biology, transcription and translation to enable a “public key” approach in which proteins (or their virtual equivalent) can be exchanged as a kind of public key, allowing the decoding of the underlying data encoded in DNA.  It is an interesting compliment to the so-called DNA stegnography, in which messages are encoded directly in the DNA bases, in something like a Caesar Cipher.

The paper appears to have some weaknesses in the cryptography, but I am nowhere near expert enough to be an effective judge- I wish that the paper has better references.  Perhaps some of our HacDC cryptography experts would be interested in giving it a go!

The details can be found in the paper here on arxiv.