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Automa 2017

by Marc Hasselbalch

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Bastounovitch
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Niall Munnelly
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starthief
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patternoverlap
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albalivsarkiv
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mnpxn
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/
1.
Automastring_AcousticGuitar_DCmotorFelt_17.05.2017 09:43
2.
Automastring_PWM_Vari_b1_14.12.2017 10:06
3.
Automaspring_01_b1_23.08.2017 11:31
4.
Automaspring_Transducer_02_10.07.2017 12:06
5.
Automastring_Hmbck01_60to140pwm_AllLayers_b2_7.10.2017 22:17

credits

released December 26, 2021

The cover says:

Marc Hasselbalch
”Automa 2017”

-

I spent a large portion of 2017 messing around with homemade instruments,
mostly various incarnations of a shoddily built monochord with an attached dc motor
that could be computer-controlled via an Arduino. I would stretch guitar strings and large
springs on the instrument and excite the material with a piece of soft felt mounted on the motor shaft.

Many takes were done using a Pure Data control patch that would sweep the speed of the motor
up and down over a given duration, sometimes very, very slowly, sometimes abruptly. I would then
multitrack and mix these recordings and listen to the interference patterns and frequency beatings the
various takes would create. Certain motor speeds would accentuate certain overtones and the
often slow sweeping would allow me to listen closely to it and stop the sweep when certain overtones
caught my attention, but I eventually found that the pseudo-random sweeping was the most interesting
way to experience the phenomena.

The monochord was at first equipped with a very cheap and very noisy single coil pickup. I didn’t
have proper tools for digitally denoising the recordings without completely robbing them of their character,
so most of the time I just didn’t really bother, which is also why they ended up on the external harddrive without
being used for much. I eventually got a humbucker pickup, which also happened to be very cheap, so the noise
persisted, so I just chose to try and look past it.

I’ve come across these recordings a few times over the years and thought I might try to denoise them with
proper tools, but I’ve found that I still don’t own the high-end denoising tools that are (probably) needed for
the task. So once again I’ve chosen to look past it. I also realized that it is probably not worth the time and effort
to denoise them completely. Who cares?

I’ve got hours upon hours of recordings of various experiments with these setups, and I’ve chosen a handful here
that were of particular interest and given them a quick fix up.

1. Automastring_AcousticGuitar_DCmotorFelt_17.05.2017 (09’43’’)
The experiment that piqued my interest at first. A computer-controlled dc motor with felt dangling from a microphone stand,
exciting the strings of an acoustic guitar. I would just let the patch randomly choose values and listen to it for quite a while.
This is a single take of what it usually sounded like.

2. Automastring_PWM_Vari_b1_14.12.2017 (10’07’’)
A multitrack recording of the patch abruptly changing speeds and sometimes not playing. 3. Automaspring_01_b1_23.08.2017 (11’31’’)
One of the first takes using a spring instead of a string. It behaved very differently when excited with the motor.

4. Automaspring_Transducer_02_10.07.2017 (12’06’’)
An example of the spring on the monochord being excited by sinewaves through a homemade transducer.

5. Automastring_Hmbck01_60to140pwm8000ms_AllLayers_b2_7.10.2017 (22’17’’)
I have quite a few variations of this setup with various sweep lengths and values. A slowly evolving multitrack recording.

- MH, 26/12/2021. Copenhagen, Denmark.

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