Feb
01
2010
By Darren Landrum
I ran across a thread over at the Pro Audio Design Forum on the making of a very high-end spring reverb using some nice physics tricks. With all of my struggling in physics classes lately, especially the vibrations and waves class, it would be nice to take these basic ideas to the professor and use all of this abstract theory we’ve been learning to design a practical device.
“Hey, Professor, I ran across some ideas for a spring reverb which looks just like something this class would cover, so I was wondering if we could…”
It’s a thought, anyway.
Jan
16
2010
By Darren Landrum
It's always nice to go off the beaten path, like this place in Tanzania. Africa is probably a little too far for me to walk, though. Photo by William Warby on Flickr. CC-BY licensed. Thank you, William!
I have the beginnings of a plan for this summer.
As I mentioned in a previous article, I have this idea of traveling around as much of the country (the United States for my international readers) and recording interesting sounds, instruments, and spaces that I can then process and splice together into musical compositions. I would also be taping my adventures with a pocket camcorder to turn it into a regular video podcast. Weight loss also figures quite heavily (pun accidental, but I’ll leave it in) into it.
There are some obvious roadblocks. One is money and resources. I have very little of either, so I would need to depend on the kindness of strangers for transport, food, Internet access, and putting me up for the night. I’m not adverse to walking and camping, but the occasional shave and shower would be nice. 
I also need to work out a way to edit video while on the road. All I have for a portable is an MSI Wind netbook, which can probably handle 848×480 video and that’s about it. Still, that’ll be good enough for Youtube. I definitely need to test this.
I have made one decision, though, and that has to do with the rights to the recordings I make. You see, if I record someone’s musical instrument or other sound-making device, in order for me to use it with no issues, I have to ask them to sign a release form. Now, I doubt most people would mind this, but since I do plan on selling music made from these recordings later (though I will also give it away), it doesn’t seem fair for me to be the only one to profit from them. So, I’ve decided that all of the raw materials I record on this adventure will be made available later under a Creative Commons license for use by anyone. Hopefully, persons who might be otherwise reluctant to sign the release form will be okay with this idea and then do so.
So from here, I need to find a nice comfy pair of boots, a nice big backpack, and then hope I find enough folks willing to help. There are sites like Couchsurfing.org that can also help. Most importantly, though, I would really love to find people who might have unusual musical instruments, know of interesting places to go, or live near some kind of space with great reverberation and ambiance. Capturing some great recordings is what this is all about, after all.
This is my first time ever trying anything like this, so I know it won’t go smoothly the entire way. I’m fine with that. Without the element of risk, it wouldn’t be an adventure.
Jan
13
2010
By Darren Landrum
If we didn't laugh, we would probably cry. Photo by Anthony M. on Flickr. CC-BY licensed.
Something occurred to me on the way home from university today.
I was remembering back to a fellow I knew once upon a time who was a pretty depressing character. He was one of those “the government is involved in the New World Order” types, convinced that we were all going to die at the hands of our own government in an all-out chemical weapons attack on our own soil. He wasn’t the easiest person in the world to be around.
I see a lot of the same thing everywhere, though. There’s all of this pessimism, and it’s always about something that’s going to happen. The axis of rotation of the Earth is going to shift in 2012. Terrorists have an antimatter bomb and are going to set it off in Yellowstone to trigger the supervolcano. The entire infrastructure of the Internet is going to be destroyed on January 19, 2038 (feel free to look that one up).
I would like to place a Pascal’s Wager on all of that.
Pascal’s Wager basically comes down to these three bullet points:
1) If you live life as if there is no God, and it turns out there isn’t, you’re fine.
2) If you live life as if there is a God, and it turns out there isn’t, nothing is lost.
3) If you live life as if there is no God, and it turns out there is, you’re screwed.
Now it seems to me that if God exists, He’ll be able to see through anybody just trying to hedge their bets, so I see little point to this exercise as presented by Pascal. Embedded within it, though, is an interesting logical process that just maybe can be used to help us be a little happier.
Consider the world around us. The Iraq War is dragging on, Afghanistan is still unstable, we have climate change and all sorts of strange weather creeping up on us (we can argue the cause another time), we have a guy setting fire to his underwear on an international flight who boarded the plane sweating nervously with no luggage with his father calling the State Department and warning them about his son going unstable and still he almost managed to pull it off but finally being thwarted not by the people we pay to catch this kind of thing but by other people on the plane giving him the beatdown… The list goes on and on.
So with this immediate, imminent, and unavoidable destruction of the world about to happen to everyone, even Rosario Dawson, how the hell could we possibly consider being optimistic and getting on with our lives?
Let’s consider this, which I call the Modified Pascal’s Wager:
1) If you’re a pessimist who just gives in and continues being miserable, and then a huge world disaster does indeed strike and destroy civilization as we know it, it’s what you expected anyway.
2) If you’re an optimist and you continue trying to live your life, and then civilization suddenly comes to a screeching halt, well, there probably wasn’t much you could do about it.
3) However, if you’re a miserable bastard who gives up on life, and then somehow the world continues to happen and civilization doesn’t end, you’ve just wasted the best years of your life spending all of your energy being a miserable bastard.
The choice seems quite clear to me.
Jan
02
2010
By Darren Landrum
… Yeah, I'd hit that. Photo by Ron Reiring on Flickr. CC Licensed.
I just had a very interesting idea.
It’s been a dream of mine to travel all over the world for quite a while now. It’s a dream that started well before I heard about the Twitchhiker, but was cemented all the much more by his story. Now, I’m a believer in starting small and working my way up, so I thought I’d start with traveling around my own country. The problem was, it wasn’t good enough for me to just want to travel. I need some kind of purpose.
The first purpose that comes to mind is the fact that I’m fat. In fact, by government standards, I’m morbidly obese, though only just, I guess. So, my thought was maybe I could walk across as large a part of the country as possible, taking my little Zi8, a sound recorder, and a small laptop out with me so I can film and edit and upload my adventures as a podcast. That’s good, but it also sounds kinda boring, for me as well as for the audience.
But today, I had a very interesting idea.
What if, instead, I made my adventure about seeking out sounds for making into music? I’ve already made it known that I want to make music by editing together sounds I record myself, whether they be serendipitous or controlled, like a collage. Sometimes, though, creativity can run thin, and maybe some travel, meeting other musicians and sound people, would be a great way to collect some great sounds and make a travel video podcast that might actually be interesting to watch.
The big problem is money. I don’t have much of it. So, like the Twitchhiker, I will have to depend on the kindness of strangers for transportation, food, and places to stay for the night, in addition to walking for the weight loss. Naturally, this would work best if the people who help me out can connect on some personal level with the mission, be they musicians or other sound and synthesis or electronics enthusiasts like me.
So if you like this idea, and you live in the US, please feel free to use the contact form or leave a comment below. It doesn’t have to be limited to people into music or electronics or sound. Perhaps you live near a cool cave or canyon with a great-sounding echo. Or you happen to own an unusual musical instrument that sounds interesting. Or you just want to be nice and help out an intrepid adventurer. I would really, really love to hear from you. Let’s see if we can make this happen this summer.
Thank you, and here’s to reaching for the stars.
Dec
29
2009
By Darren Landrum
It turns out you can make your own… Photo by Dominic Alves on Flickr. CC licensed.
I found some pretty cool resources for building your own slide rules.
To start with, I’ll reiterate the one I linked to in the last post. A professor of physics at Montana State has a DIY circular slide rule you can print out and put together.
Sphere Research Corporation has a nice page with a variety of slide rule designs you can build and use. In fact, one of these will be the first one I attempt to make myself. My plan is to build a prototype with foam core.
Finally, here’s a nice page at the Slide Rule Museum talking about various slide rule scales along with some designs for download.
So there you go. If you’ve ever been fascinated with the hundreds-years-old calculation device that helped get us to the Moon, it’s easier than ever to dive right in and give them a shot.
Dec
26
2009
By Darren Landrum
I just ordered off for one of these slide rules from ThinkGeek.com. For some strange reason, I feel the need to know how to use one. Photo from ThinkGeek.com. Hopefully, they don’t mind.
I think I just figured something out, in a non-Craig Ferguson kind of way.
I’ve been looking up the field of instrumentation, which is a specialty of the physics world. It deals with things like devising experiments and designing apparatus to take measurements. I have a fascination with scientific instruments of all kinds and for all scientific disciplines, so it really isn’t much of a surprise to me that I might think about aiming my graduate studies toward the design of such devices. But it was while watching How It’s Made (an episode apparently so new that it doesn’t yet show up in the episode guide on the official web site) on the making of astrolabes and thinking to myself both “I want one!” and “how would I go about making one?” that it occurred to me that perhaps the process of measurement is my calling.
And why not? There’s something very attractive about becoming a world-renowned expert in the measurement of anything and everything that can be possibly be measured. However, my passion goes beyond just measurement, and into the realm of scientific instrumentation in general, such as that slide rule in the picture, which calculates as opposed to measures.
The New York Times has an excellent article on a hydraulic calculator built by a New Zealander named Bill Phillips. It uses the flow of water in various creative ways to model financial systems and help solve problems, thus making it one of the more unique analog computers ever built. You can see a video of it in action on the Cambridge University web site.
There are also many examples of electronic analog computers out there, a notable example being the Heathkit EC-1. At my previous school here in Port Huron, the physics department has two of these sitting in the basement. My physics professor offered to let me take one of them home to play with, but I never got around to taking him up on the offer.
So, maybe this is my calling, becoming an expert in scientific instrumentation for both measurement and calculation. It sounds like fun.
PS – If you want to make your own calculation instrument, here’s a DIY circular slide rule design on the Montana State web site. It’s precision is dependent on how good the printer is, though, so borrow a good printer if you don’t have one.
Dec
23
2009
By Darren Landrum
I am now proud to present to you, my latest project: Makerlists! This is the culmination of what I had talked about before, only it’s actually up and running now. Okay, granted, it’s just a DNS forward to a Google Sites page, but hey, 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing, right?
In fact, that DNS forward seems to be causing issues for some, so if the link given above doesn’t work, you can use this one instead, which is simply the direct link to the Google Site.
For the email lists themselves, I’m using Google Groups, since I feel at this time that they work pretty darn well for our purposes. There is only one group made so far, for Port Huron, Michigan, and it only has one member. I’ll give you three guesses who that is. Still, it’s a start, it works, and now I can call on others out there who would like to be moderators for their local areas. You can contact me via this blog’s contact form.
Dec
06
2009
By Darren Landrum
Coils like this one are still often handmade from first principles by hobbyists, due to the expense and limited range of values available commercially. Photo by Windell H. Oskay at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. CC-BY licensed.
Being a physics student, I’m all about “first principles.” Next semester, I’ll be taking an electronics course that is part of the physics curriculum (ie, it has a PHY prefix) that, according to the professor, will be about electronics design but starting more from first principles than modern design techniques.
So just what are these “first principles”, anyway? Well, you can imagine a modern electronics designer, professional or otherwise, deciding what value of capacitor is needed for a specific part of a circuit. They would then order that value of part from a supply house. Now imagine if you had to make your own capacitor from scratch. Could you calculate the area of the plates and the dielectric constant of whatever insulator you place between them just right, so you end up with the correct value?
That is what is meant by first principles. And believe it or not, there were once engineers who could do this. Probably the best example I’ve found is a man named Dave Young, who worked for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. (Scroll down until you see his name as a subheading.)
So how important do I believe first principles to be in modern electronics design? Well, it all depends on your final goal, I suppose. Let’s face it, it’s easy enough to buy components in whatever value you need. Do you really need to know how to make your own capacitors, or resistors, or inductors? Well, an argument can be made for the latter, if only because ready-made ones are pricey and rolling your own can save money. There are also people who make their own guitar pickups, probably more for fun than for money savings, though.
And that gets to the essence of my interest in electronics design from first principles: it sounds like fun. Imagine a shortwave radio with caps, coils, and resistors that you made yourself. As a bonus, you’d learn a lot about the physics of electricity, and that’s important. So I have high hopes for this next class I’ll be taking. I hope it lives up to them.
Nov
30
2009
By Darren Landrum
*sigh* You will be missed. Photo from Rigol’s web site.
I was going to buy a new oscilloscope today. A Rigol DS1052E, to be precise. A nice, new, digital scope capable of mixed-signal operation. They aren’t a high-end scope, but for the money, there is nothing else that beats them. This guy really likes them, too.
So what happened? My computer blew up last night.
Not literally, of course. It started with a spontaneous shutdown of the system. When I tried to reboot it, I could get no post beeps. So I started pulling things out, one at a time, testing it each time, and I got no post beeps every time. Even when I had pulled the CPU, unplugged the DVD-R, all the hard drives, memory, all of it, I could get no post beeps. So I tested the power supply under load. All voltages were normal. Well, new motherboard it is, then.
I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to do a little upgrade. So today, I ordered a new motherboard and CPU combo, a Gigabyte something-or-other with an AMD 953 chipset or something like that, plus an AMD Phenom X4, which will make this my first ever quad-core machine. Not bad for $180, I suppose. Then I decided to add on one of those Kodak Zi8 camcorders I’ve been coveting. So now, the total bill is $360, which is $20 shy of the total cost of the Rigol. So, no new oscilloscope for me.
But I’m sure the new camcorder will make up for that.
Nov
06
2009
By Darren Landrum
Springs: You can pluck 'em or bow 'em. Photo by Sheila Steele on Flickr. CC licensed.
My fascination with springs might be due to the fact that I’ve lived for most of my life in Colorado Springs.
I’ll give you a few minutes to get over that awful pun.
All good? Okay. This idea stems from Nick’s awesomely sproingy spring reverb. All of his sound samples, rather than demonstrating the device as a reverb, instead demonstrates it as a spacey or horror movie-esque bowed musical instrument.
Another example is a child’s toy I’ve brought up before, the Zube Tube. That last link goes to their page with the sound samples. Feel free to take a listen, though you might need VLC to do so thanks to the Ultimate Cosmic Toy Company’s inability to get their web site out of the nineties. A pair of Zubes are definitely on my Christmas wish list this year. Of course, the way the Zube is designed, you can’t take a bow to it, but its other design features make up for that.
Either way, my point is that although these devices make awesome pitched sounds like are musically useful, they aren’t very controllable. By “controllable”, I’m referring to the way a guitar is controllable: Place a finger on a specific string at a specific fret, you get back a specific note. This tends to always work. Springs, however, can be a little more chaotic. But hey, that’s what makes them fun, right?
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