Circuit Bending at El entresuelo

Linking April to May 2010, We´ve been at Elche with our project Dio3Stu
El entresuelo, an art and design company, had ordered and reserved a corner at their place to have one of our pieces of circuit bending.
The piece is a site-specific project that is built into one corner of the study. Mix basic sounds with samplers of phonetic poetry.
It´s integrated some metal letters acting as variable resistors.
An specific poetic sound object for this study of design.

We began taking to pieces some pianos of "Chinese shop" and a pair of Megaphones costing 6 and 8 €. We seek the most interesting points of these power circuits for bending:

Once we took in parts the instruments and seeing their potential, we developped the design of the plastic sheet and bent it with a blowtorch. El Entresuelo´s staff gave us some metal letters to create variable resistors.
We set three modified circuits in the following order:
2 megaphones - Top and bottom (yellow buttons and LEDs)
A piano - Central part (buttons and red LEDs)
)


We drilled to insert these power circuits and electronic components, moving the modified circuits we had created.



Afterwards, we coloured the wall´s hollow and the plastic sheet with fluorescent to highlight the letters.

The sheet with everything inserted:

The sounds that were recorded in the two samplers of megaphones were the pronunciation of these metal letters (R,Z,G,B,N,F)+ and the word "el entresuelo".
The sound of the megaphones can be altered by potentiometers and touching the metal letters whose LEDs are switched on.
By activating two at a time, we get different coupling and interferences.

Central module has a “start” (red buttom) which activates different melodies, a "noise" (green button) that distorts and becomes plane melody, and several letters that act as "pitch" and "distortion" in its potential combinations.

With all that we got successfully destroy melodies to noise and also we can play in a percussive way. El entresuelo´s Corner has become one of those Dio3Stu machines you get interact with space and sound. Even you could think you´re talking to the wall through this sound piece.

We have some samples videos: