Hacking a Discman into a glitch machine!

A while ago I came across a female hacker/circuit bender under the name r20029 who managed to turn an obsolete Sony Discman into a crispy glitch machine! She baptised it the 'Sony Discbitch' :-)
I managed to hack my own CD player. Here's what it sounds like:

What the hack does is getting access to the anti-skip IC which stores a couple of seconds of audio on a RAM chip. The position of this chip varies from player to player so look up the name of the chip until you find the anti-skip IC. The pins A0 through A9 are DRAM adress pins. If we connect these pins together, we can confuse the machine to get glitchy playback and weird artifacts and noise.

After damaging a couple of CD players I finally managed to solder wires onto the tiny surface mount pins. Hot glue is your friend to make sure you don't accidently pull the wires off the pins when you've soldered it all together.

I think this mod holds great potential for a future module for my modular setup. Maybe have a couple of sample CD's with different material suited for glitchifying.

Aristoteles Logic Synth Update #4: Logic Gates

I thought it was time for building the next module for dear Aristoteles, my 'lo-fi logic synth project' so I did the logic gate module which consists of 8 AND gates with 2 inputs and an LED for the output. The truth table on the right describes how the gate will behave: the output only goes high (1) when both inputs are high. The result is a very simple form of amplitude modulation, or it can be used to control the path of signals from the other modules with counters or LFO's, you name it.  The video below speaks for itself.

In the video I demonstrate the effect of the 3 different frequency ranges on the oscillators: LFO range signals are good for 'letting through' audio range signals at a certain rate for "beep beep beep beep" sounds. 2 audio range signals will generate complex pulsating modulations and beatings when adjusting the pulse width.
Setting the range to the high pitched setting on both oscillators will generate classic vintage radio-like modulation squeeks. I also tried using the 'octave divider module' for one of the inputs which has its own unique sound.

I chose to have all the logic gates as AND gates. For a long time I was in doubt about wether to have a pair of XOR or NAND gates just for the hell of it but I could not find a good reason as they don't do much sound-wise where as the AND gate is so clear in its function and I want to be able to make complex signal paths with counters, dividers, random clocks and all eight oscs - all controlling each other through the gates. 

I am already starting on the 10-step counter 'cause I cannot wait to have each step 'open' a unique oscillator with different frequencies!

The circuit is very simple, I basically just wired the in- and outputs straight to the 4081 but attached 100K resistors on each pin to prevent static electricity from the end of the wires going into the chip when patching.
LED's are controlled by transistors as always to prevent voltage dropping on the outputs.

UPDATE:
I had my brother a.k.a. SNU over and he fell in love with the new module which resulted in hours of wiggling.
Here's a a little peak of the tweak :-)

Audiovisual concerts: Plasma globe and 'TV light-to-sound effect'

Hi guys, I've been busy preparing for a couple of live shows I've been doing over the last month or so. I've been really into the idea of having an electromagnetic source translate into both light and sound at the same time as to have it as an audiovisual mini-installation on stage.

First experiment I wanted to test out was to "read" the video signal from a small monochrome CRT TV with a photocell (just wire a jack plug onto an ordinary solar cell or what have you) and having played around with translating sound to light with these small TV's I thought I wanted to try and combine both of these:
converting sound -> light and from light -> sound again! Kind of like a CRT-TV effects pedal of some sort.

I explain it all in the video beneath but I am using both a regular B/W TV where I send a sound signal into the composite video port which shows up on the screen as horizontal lines flickering in synch with the audio and then I tried with one of my TV-oscilloscopes and a photcell as well. The result is surprisingly interesting as it resembles the original signal quite a lot but still alters it in a distorted, fuzzy, gated kinda way.

I am thinking of developing the TV with a small board before the TV to adjust the signal in various ways, could be really neat! But already you have the brightness and contrast knobs with which you can make the sound only appear on the screen when it reaches a certain intensity level bright enough for the solar cell to detect it, thus making some gating mechanism.

Here's a concert I played in a cold war bunker here in Aarhus. I brought both TV's along together with my sampler, my cacophonator and greeting card sampler to be able to mix various signals to be sent into the TV's. Tye sampler spew out a weird bleeping sound for every clock for its step sequencer so I had to switch over to dry signal with that. I've learned a fair share of do's and don'ts since the first gig with this setup! :-)
Here's a small clip from the concert - event was called 'DIEM Elektro: Isolated Space')

Simultaneously I'd been exploring the wonders of electromagnetic induction coils for picking up various "hidden sounds" in electronic equipment and one night at my rural summmers house I had the pleasure of toying around with my brothers large plasma globe and thought it could be insane to eavesdrop to a plasma globe with the coil. Got a very cheap usb/5v-powered one and the sounds it spurts out through the coil is just heavenly! Such a pure electronic signal, striaght from the source :-)

This one I also  plan to evolve into an actual instrument with controls for all kinds of stuff, power supply and modulating the frequency of the coil and os on - lot's to come in the future! Here's a concert where I use the plasma ball "synth" - the sound might not do it much justice as my sampler was filled to burst with weird organic noise samples.

Thanks for looking, hope it sparked some inspiration in you - I myself couldn't help but to send dear Dr. Tesla a thought every once in a while listening and looking to the zapping electrodes of the plasma globe 3:-)