First steps

Posted on September 8, 2017

Construction

A prototype is already underway! In order to test that I can reproduce the EBow’s electronic components, I am building a minimal structure that can hold a string and a pickup.

I went to the metal shop to cut and prepare prototypes of the bridges. Also spent some time in the wood shop to prepare the base onto which the bridges and the electronics will be put.

At this point, I’ll need to find a tuning key and and pickup, so that I can obtain a sound signal from the contraption.

Inspiration

Artists and Works

While exploring for artists that work in the same field, it was suggested that I look into Thomas Bégin. It turns out his work is really interesting, I’ll definitely look more into his works.

On another note, I was looking into mechanical instruments and prepared instruments. I stumbled onto Wintergatan, who did a series of videos exploring some of the mechanical instruments presented at the Speelklok Museum of Utrecht.

Literature

As I mentioned in the proposal, I wanted to explore Brutalism and Constructivism as they could be inspiration for the visual aesthetic of the musical sculpture.

As it turns out, Constructivism is not at all a sculptural or architectural movement, but rather a philosophy of education! It’s not altogether uninteresting, but at this point I will put it aside so I can concentrate on subjects related to the project.

As for Brutalism, which is not an architectural movement I appreciate all that much, I do believe it can be an interesting influence for a sculpture. I picked out some books from the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec so that I can discover a bit more about it.

Finally, I was looking into the NIME archives for interesting papers, and I found a few:

• E. Singer, K. Larke, and D. Bianciardi, “Lemur guitarbot: midi robotic string instrument”
• O. Lähdeoja, “An approach to instrument augmentation : the electric guitar”
• S. Ferguson, A. Martin, and A. Johnston, “A corpus-based method for controlling guitar feedback”
• J. Murphy, J. McVay, A. Kapur, and D. Carnegie, “Designing and building expressive robotic guitars”
• R. Graham and J. Harding, “Septar: audio breakout design for multichannel guitar”
• R. Vindriis and D. Carnegie, “Strumbot—an overview of a strumming guitar robot”

I have quite a few things in hand already, so it’s on me to read a bit more and prepare the prototype.