building some assemblages

after a rather frustrating error with some soldering that resulted in one of my amps being destroyed, today was much more successful. another amp built, this time successfully, worked on the first test and brings the total to 3 constructed amplifiers.

 this is the amp i messed up, literally, burning the connections into oblivion.

this basically breaks the chain of connections and means the circuit is broken.

 successful amp construction - testing

whilst i wait for jaycar to reopen after the holidays, i moved on to making the contact microphones. after some net surfing about these microphones and some youtube videos on how to make them i discovered you can take these sensors called piezo sensors, cut the plastic casing off of them, and extract the brass and ceramic disc from the middle. 

 this is how the sensors look when you buy them

this is the inner disc that you take out,

and these things are the microphones.

the inner disc is able to detect vibrations. the ceramic bit just moves very slightly, simply by pressure. you basically just connect the wires to an amp, so it makes the tiny fluctuations larger. then plug a speaker into the amp to hear what the vibrations sound like.

placing the discs against walls, glass, wood or really, any surface, means that they detect the sound waves hitting the material and the vibrations caused by anything else touching the material.

for this next show, 4 of these will be placed against the 4 pipes in the middle of the room. when i went to look at the exhibition space i noticed these pipes were each emitting a subtle sound of water, echoing metallic sounds and what i thought were human voices. so that experience led to the idea of amplifying those sounds to enable them to fill the space like liquid.