Interface Amnesty 3

Interface Amnesty is an event run by SoundNetwork. It shows off new interfaces that artists have been working to control sound/vision/bubbles/and much more. This was the third Interface Amnesty (Noise Club have been at all three), and was part of the Abandon Normal Devices festival. This time the event was held in Noiselab in Manchester.

It was a double-whammy for me, as I was there not only with Noise Club, but with the Inari Noodle project I had been working on.

For the Noise Club stall, we demonstrated a few of the new instruments we'd been working on. Mike Loftus, always the prolific builder, had modified a cello with brake pedals (see clip below), and was also demonstrating his new electronic instrument he'd built with home-made capacitors. I showed off some of the work I've been doing on controlling feedback with physical objects (more of this to come in future posts).



Inari Noodle is an audiovisual noodle bar project by Japanese artist, Inari Nishiki. My role in the project was quite extensive: writing computer-game-type music to use as the project's theme; creating a media player for the audiovisual clips, and getting them to play when a particular type of noodle was selected; and controlling the noodle dispenser using servos controlled by an Arduino. It was really interesting working on the Arduino - so many possibilities - and I think I'm going to use the knowledge I gained in the process to create a robotics project at some point in the future. More to come, then...

In the meantime, here's a short clip of the moment I got the Arduino controlling its first servo.

Noise Club at Hazard MMX

Just starting to get round to uploading some documentation of my exploits the past few months. So here's the first bit, Noise Club's project, I Lie in Wait..., at Hazard MMX.

Hazard MMX is a yearly  festival in Manchester run by hÅb and greenroom. The Noise Club project was a playful game of sonic hide and seek. It was performed by myself and Adam Webster. Here's how we described it for the brochure:

Mischievous and playful, a chance discovery and a random event, it could change your life or you could just pass by, unaware. Part installation, part performance this interactive sound work lurks hidden, waiting to take you by surprise. Will you find me? I lie in wait...

After walking round Manchester all day, greatly confusing the happy residents of the city, we went back to greenroom. But we couldn't resist going back out to a nearby tunnel to have a bit of a play... amazing acoustics! Have a look at this short video clip of us...

Thanks to Tamsin Drury for a creating such a fun-filled event!