SCRAP WOOD · BAMBOO · PERFORATED STEEL SPRINGS · FOUND OBJECTS · RUSTED IRON PLAY THEM IN THE BROWSER
Scrap wood, split bamboo, punched metal sheet, tension springs, coiled steel ribbon, a paint tin,
rubber balls, a rusted machine part. These objects were built in the Critical Sound Design Studio as
experiments in making instruments out of whatever the workshop and the street will give you. With a piezo
taped to the body and the signal routed through live electronics, they are performed live, which is what
happened at the Listening Otherwise conference. This page is their digital counterpart: press a part of
the photograph and that part answers.
About
CRITICAL SOUND DESIGN STUDIO WORKSHOP WITH JAY KREIMER LISTENING OTHERWISE
The instruments
Three objects, all built from discarded material: scrap wood and plank offcuts, split bamboo, perforated
steel sheet, wire mesh, tension springs, a coiled steel ribbon, threaded rod, nails, a brass cog, a paint tin,
a rusted mechanical linkage, rubber balls, terracotta, a river stone, a glass tube. Nothing was bought as a
musical part. The sound comes out of what the material already wanted to do: the springs ring, the bamboo
columns resonate, the punched sheet rattles, the plank bodies carry everything else.
They are designed to be amplified rather than played acoustically. A piezo disc or contact microphone on
the body picks up the small sounds that are inaudible in a room, and that signal is routed through live
electronics, where it can be filtered, looped, distorted and fed back. At that point the object stops being a
quiet piece of junk and becomes a performable instrument. This is how they were used in performance.
Critical Sound Design Studio
The studio treats sound as a critical practice rather than a service discipline: listening, instrument
building, improvisation and live electronics, instead of sound design as post-production polish. Building
instruments from scrap is part of the pedagogy. It removes the question of what a proper instrument is, and
replaces it with the question of what this object can be made to do.
The workshop with Jay Kreimer
These instruments were built during a workshop that Jay Kreimer, a master instrument maker, ran with the
Critical Sound Design Studio students. The students then performed on the instruments they had built. The
ensemble they formed called itself Brains on Fire.
Listening Otherwise
Brains on Fire performed as part of Listening Otherwise, the first international, practice-led
conference on improvised music of its kind in India, produced by W.I.P Labs and hosted at CEPT University and
the Kanoria Centre for Arts in Ahmedabad. The conference put visiting practitioners, including Raymond
MacDonald of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Jay Kreimer and Aldo Ahmad, into direct working contact with
the Delhi Improvisers Orchestra and with students, in workshops and open rehearsals rather than only in
papers and panels. The student ensemble was formed inside the conference itself: instruments built in a
workshop, played in performance days later.
People
Jay Kreimer
Instrument maker and performer, based in the United States, who builds and performs on his own
invented instruments. He led the instrument-building workshop with the Critical Sound Design Studio
students from which these three objects came, and performed at Listening Otherwise.
Anirban Ghosh
Musician and practitioner-scholar, bass player and improviser, founder and artistic director of
W.I.P Labs and co-founder of the Delhi Improvisers Orchestra. He teaches critical sound design as a
professor of practice and was the studio tutor for this work.
Kirti Sharma
Producer and sound practitioner, part of W.I.P Labs, and teaching assistant for the studio.
Credits
Studio tutorAnirban Ghosh
Teaching assistantKirti Sharma
Collaborator, instrument buildingJay Kreimer
EnsembleBrains on Fire
ContextCritical Sound Design Studio · Listening Otherwise
This web instrument
Each photograph is the interface. Every visible part is mapped to a hotspot by hand and wired to a
synthesis module chosen from its material: resonator banks for metal, delay-loop strings for wire, comb
resonators for the bamboo columns, frequency modulation for the springs, granular clouds for the perforated
sheets, tuned noise for rubber. The animation is driven by the actual audio coming out of that part. The
macro controls, and Impossibility in particular, push the object past anything it could do physically. A
component can also be given a real recording of the physical part, which the sample and granular engines
then play instead of the synthesised material.
Add an instrument
Upload a photograph of a self-built or found-object instrument. The picture is segmented by colour,
contrast and edge energy; region size sets pitch, surface roughness sets decay, and the guessed material
picks the engine. It proposes, you correct.
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DOCMUT
Hover to inspect · press to excite · drag to deform