Other Projects
BBX
A project I worked on during university was the Beer Bottle Xylophone, or BBX, which is an instrument I built from scratch. Using 6 empty beer bottles and filling them with different amounts of water, I was able to create a xylophone styled home made instrument. This part was easy.
The longest part of the process was building the box itself. I removed pieces of wood and their dangerous nails from unused drawers and after a few miscalculations in measurements I was finally able to piece it together using super glue. By cutting holes in to the top panel of wood, the beer bottles could slot into place nicely. The final step was adding the corner chunks of wood to provide some support for the somewhat rickety box. Watch the video below to hear it in action!
Interactive Installation
The concept behind the project is to take the listener, of which there is only one at a time, and make them feel detached from reality and uneasy.
There were four microphones set-up in the corners of the room and a fifth set up in a box placed in front of the listener on an opposite chair.
Four people positioned by the mics were whispering, shouting, making random noises some of which would direct the listener to engage or react to something they had done but a lot of the time it was just creepy statements and generic insults. At the same time this was triggering reactions on a visual display projected directly in front of them.
It had positive results, depending on your definition of positive of course and many of the people involved could not take the intensity of the situation. The listener was wearing headphones to remove them even further and isolate them in this audio visual hell.
We used a few methods to achieve this…
Five mics in total ran into a Tascam US1800 interface which fed into a laptop running EnergyXT recording software. The software then produced different effects on every mic and an eq on the boxed mic and fed back through the interface into a line in on a different laptop which used Winamp and various plug-ins to produce the real time visualisations.
The video doesn’t really display the full affect or intensity of the project and it was filmed more as a document of the process.