MzTEK

Last weekend was not just the very much needed August bank holiday, it was also our last workshop for the Hacked Human Orchestra project *sob*! The workshop took place at the absolutely lovely Shambala Festival in Northamptonshire, which prides itself as being a ‘..space to play, to reinvent and revitalise…’. We couldn’t agree more :)

With us were our awesome collaborators on the project, Guerilla Science, PhD student Shauna Concannon and Hannah Perner-Wilson from Kobakant. It was a pleasure to have Hannah with us as Kobakant have been an inspiration to us throughout the project and have helped us along the way with the design of the wearable instruments.

Like Wilderness Festival a couple of weeks ago, participants at the workshop made wearable pianos:

Beatbox machines:

And a new screech instrument!:

The latter we are VERY proud of, as for it we designed our first PCB:

Like at Wilderness, after finishing their instrument each participant went and played it for composer Florian Lunaire who is creating a track from all the sound samples he took. We can’t wait to hear it and when it’s finished you’ll be able to listen to it on our website. We will also be releasing all the learning materials from the project on our Workshop Material page.

We would like to thank a number of people for helping us with the project; Lush Projects for helping us with the piano instrument as Iain very kindly provided us with the circuit diagram for it, the Royal Academy of Engineering for supporting the project and Jamie Allen and Jo Kazuhiro for letting us use their circuit from the Chiptune Marching Band project for our screech instrument.

For more images from the Shambala workshop, please see our Flickr stream.

It’s under 2 days until the Hacked Human Orchestra workshop! We’re very excited about this and have thoroughly enjoyed partnering with Guerilla Science and working with Kobakant and researcher Shauna Concannon to produce it.

The process to produce it has been extremely varied, experimenting with an array of components and materials. We thought it would be fun to give you a little peek into what we’ve been getting up to over the last month whilst producing it.

One instrument which we’re very proud of is a soft circuit piano! It’s taken a lot of different iterations to turn it into a wearable instrument (displayed above in T-shirt form). The final piece has been created using a soft circuit (a circuit made with conductive thread, rather than using wires as you would in a traditional circuit) incorporating many different resistors, capacitors, transistors and 4 buttons, which depending on which resistor they’re connected to will make different sounds when pressed. The output has taken the form of a mini 8Ohm speaker which you can see attached to crocodile clips

The T-shirt was inspired by Kobakant’s solar T-shirt:

The first attempt of making this consisted of a circuit on a breadboard using various different resistors to create different pitches and the second one used the same circuit but using soft materials. We then moved onto the final iteration for which we had some help with our friend Iain Sharp from Lush Projects who helped us design the circuit. From it we created this wonderful piece which as well as the mentioned technical bits contains lots of colorful felt!

Other experiments have taken the form of playing with musical cards and other playback devices, toy hacking, making soft circuit buttons, making conductive pompoms and also creating dinosaur-like spikes which when squeezed change their tune!

We’ll be putting all the learning materials online next week from the workshop, including circuits and a list of components so that anyone can take download it and make their own wearable instruments!