Lo-Fi Adventure #1 - the Gourd speaker array

CCM2 recently celebrated the completion of a beautiful new speaker array for our Laptop Orchestra project. While I was thrilled by the department's breakthrough and the prospect of my own personal array, the winter break left me low on both the funds and patience for such a venture. As a result, I took an evening and gathered some materials together for my own makeshift speaker array:

-1 dried gourd
-1 1/8" headphone jack w/ a decent length cable
-5 small speakers (I grabbed some from my ever-growing pile of broken tape machines)
-soldering iron
-a pocket knife
-sandpaper
-some sort of glue

With these humble means, a couple of hours, and very little sense of craftsmanship, I ended up with this:



Admittedly, I was a bit underwhelmed with the sound at first -- certainly not something to play a nicely mastered CD on. However, using Max/MSP and playing around with various sound files, I found the crunchy, buzzy lo-fi texture that I was hoping to use it for.

I immediately put my new creation to work by taking a small processed sample of an old French folk song and playing it through the speaker over and over again, gradually reducing the sound to a dull drone. I used a collage of the process as the basis for a new piece, which can be found in part here (called "Il pleut, il pleut" after the folk song).

For the complete piece (and many, many more pieces), check out the Indie Music Cancer Drive, a great music-related service project organized by Josh Whelchel.

Also, stay tuned for more info about the REAL speaker array completed by engineering student David Friedlander and CCM2.