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 and gate/sync modulation. We'll also learned about the importance of buffering. LED blinked rhythmically.

Slides, without nearly enough pictures or comments: Media: modulation.pdf

Day 4: 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?

Here's the slides from class: Media: sequencing.pdf

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 plus the circuit-bender trick of current-starving the chip.

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

The Bug Brand Workshop Oscillator gets a lot of mileage from simple Sync sounds combined and distorted. See his how-to PDF for details.

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)