Noisemaker Workshop

Overview

The Noisemaker Workshop will teach you how to build noise-making electrical devices from the ground up. We'll be mostly building our own gear, but we'll also borrow a couple tricks from the glitch/bender tradition.

This workshop series involves soldering, (ab)use of digital CMOS chips for analog ends, a smidgen of electronics knowledge (provided), and plenty of noise. You bring the musical sensibility (not required).

Day 1: Getting Oscillating

This class focuses on the 74HC14 logic chip and how it can be used to make a square-wave oscillator. By using a light-dependent resistor in the feedback loop, you can control the pitch by waving your hands around.

Media: NoisemakerWorkshop_Day1.pdf

Day 2: Modulation

So you've got one oscillator. Great, now build another. Now have the second feed into the first. Fun.

In this class, we get around to Frequency Modulation, Ring Modulation, Gate/Sync, Pulse waveforms, and ghetto Amplitude Modulation. We'll also learn about the importance of buffering. LED's will blink rhythmically.

Day 3: Sequencing, Clocking

Using a low-frequency as a clock source, we'll drive a counter which drives a multi-way switch. Point the switch at different resistors = different pitches = 8-step sequencer. Mayhem? Music?

Day 4: Amplification and Filtration

Here we go a little bit analog. Using a 74hc04 chip as a buffer/amplifier, we start to get non-square waves. An amplifier with a capacitor in its feedback loop makes a nice lowpass filter. Here, we'll also do some real Amplitude Modulation.

Onward

At this point, you're going to know most of what I do. No more learning, only discovering...

Resources

"Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking" is a very good dead-tree book on DIY sound hacking. If you've got money to drop on it, it's worth it. You can probably con me into lending you my copy for a week or so. It's a quick read, but you could spend months replicating his projects.

Some of the sequencing ideas are loosely taken from: [fun with sea moss (or, basic digital sound devices)].

For pushing the limits of tolerable noisemaking, [The Cacophonator] is pretty cool, and uses some of our tricks. It gets a lot of noise out of a single 40106/74hc14.

Ray Wilson's [Wacky Sound Generator] is another good starter noisemaker.

Note: many of these resources require translating from old 4000-series CMOS into lower-voltage 74hc00 series chips:

40106 -> 74hc14 (Inverter with Schmitt trigger)
4051 -> 74hc4051 (8-channel switch)
4040 -> 74hc4040 (Binary Counter)