The series of videos on this page show developments during the first year of the synthesis project. Some of this material appears elsewhere on this site.
Read the project description if you want to find out more about the thinking that I’m doing around these works.
Time poor? The first thirty seconds of each of these videos will give you a pretty good idea of what’s happening with each of these works. Want to mediate on slowly evolving sound and movement? I’ve left a couple of longer videos here for you to do that.
There are a lot of good wholesome bass frequencies in synth sounds that I’m working with here so it’s best to listen with headphones or through good quality speakers (laptop and phone speakers won’t do justice to the audio aspects of this work).
These two videos are the first tests from 4 February 2021 where I use the synthesizer signals to control stepper motors. First up the LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator):
In the next video I use the envelope generator to drive the motor. This signal also controls the loudness of the note over time:
I’ve since used a combination of the LFO and the envelope generator to drive motors in many ways. In the next video I move a ribbon with these signals. The envelope generator moves the ribbon side to side while the LFO lifts it up and down. I have inverted the colours in this except (the original footage is a black ribbon shot against a white backdrop):
After these works I upgraded the motors and one of the bearings on my machine. While I was doing this I shot videos of the motors responding to synth signals without any mechanical attachments including this macro video of the end of the motor shaft. The shaft is 12mm diameter.
The upgrade to the machine took some time so I didn’t start making ink on paper drawings until November 2021. Here is one of the first drawings that I made with the upgraded machine. In this video the LFO and envelope modulate one another (NB if you don’t hear anything at the beginning of this video it means your speakers/headphones don’t quite have the bass response required to appreciated this work in all it’s glory):
In the next video recorded midi notes pass through a midi to CV converter to provide the synth envelope signals that you hear and that drive the horizontal axis. The vertical axis is controlled by three LFOs modulating each other.
In the first of these two drawing works there is a strong form and pattern that comes from the more predictable way in which the control voltages modulate one another. In the second of these works there is a lot more variation, however there is still a subtle underlying pattern. A lot of the territory that I am exploring in the drawing aspect of this project lies between these two works.
In the first half of 2021 I was also working on the first sculptural elements of this project. In this video you can hear how a parabolic arc filters certain frequencies of the noise that was playing in the studio as I recorded this (I switch to a stereo mic at around 2:20):
This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
