musical chair

This project is a fund raiser for the Alachua county elementary schools music and arts programs. They have a face book fan page with some picks of last years chairs and starting to get some from this year as well. I started this with intentions of making the chair look like bronze and putting a patina on it. The first step was to sand it down and put on a layer of molding paste to give the texture of a bronze casting.

Then I applied some bronze paint  This is actually bronze dust in acrylic so it will take a patina just like real bronze.

Long before I heard I was invite too be in this show I had been collecting the electronic "guts" from musical greeting cards.  Mostly birthday cards.  I got several from my Mom as well.  I've been wanting to do something with them ever since and this seemed like the perfect chance the show was even called " musical chairs"  the original idea was to use these old cards and the assorted sounds, some pretty cheesy.  I decided to find the parts and program them with my own electronic music and spoken word.

Programing the chips is done in 2 ways depending on the type of electronics on the board.  Most of the ones I used here have a simple on board mike and a record button. After soldering on the new wire and adding bigger activating buttons I hold down the record switch on the device and play the sounds.  First I had to make the sounds and the program I show here is Sample Wiz for the ipad.  I used spoken word directly into the app and applied fx and used the key board to compose short, 10 second sound bites. I went thru a series of steps and samples before coming to the conclusion that the complex, multi layed, tracks were to overwhelming for the little computers.  They are designed, after all, to sing happy birthday and that's about it.  So I had to simplify my plan and scale back some of the sounds. The range of sound is narrow.  Bass doesn't come thru the tiny speakers and hi treble distorts. The volume is low.  There is another type of board that has a usb plug in and it slides into the usb on the computer and you can down load any .wav file that will fit.  I used 2 of these to make a "stereo" recording of a train coming into a station,  It goes from one side of the chair to the other,  It's 104 seconds long so I didn't include that in the vid. Who has an attention span that long these days?  Maybe I'll make a separate vid of that.  I also used an app called Nanostudio. This is an amazing program. An entire recording studio on your iphone for 20.00. Kids growing up today that will benefit from this auction, will not be able to appreciate what a leap forward this technology has been. They will add their own discoveries to it for the next leap. The innovation is non stop.
Before now you had to use a powerful computer with lots of memory and very complicated programs called Digital Audio Workstations.(daw)  The iso platform has changed music making. It is now possible for anyone to tap into their musical creativity

 In these shots the chair has been patinaed and I'm in the process of attaching the electronics.  The units vary in the way they activate.  The ones that come directly from the greeting cards require the contact to be held down . The ones I bought toggle on and off. I soldered on longer wires and added buttons.  Two of the units are activated by light. The blue rag is to keep that one from constantly going on.  These have a battery life of about 300 pays.  I don't want to waste them on me.

I ended up using 10 working electronics that vary in length from 10 seconds to 104 seconds. You can bid on this chair and 26 others at the fund raiser on March 2 at the Doris Bardon Art Center.
You can hear more of my electronic music at http://www.photogenicmemory.bandcamp.com/  and some of the sketchier stuff at www.soundcloud.com/pdidit