TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Hacks Into Music

two thousand twelve, back in the good old days, I guess. Anyway, this particular episode is called tech Stuff Hacks into Music, and Chris and I go into some interesting discussions about technology and music, and this was one of those cases where it was really really handy to have Chris so on. Chris is always a joy and I loved having a podcast with him. But as you may or may not know, he has performed as a professional musician many times, even when on tour with big name music groups and stuff.

So that's pretty cool. Anyway, check out this classic episode. We're going to talk about musical hacks today. So again we're in our series of episodes about using technology to do stuff what it was not meant to do, or or to to to manipulate it, change it, to tweak it in some way so it behaves in a new

and exciting way. We want to talk about that sort of culture, that and the music culture and how those two overlap, because it turns out that a lot of people who have liked to hack physical as well as virtual types of stuff are also really into the music. That's true. Um, yeah, a lot of the we we've kind of touched on this in the past, recorded in

an episode in early two thousand eleven about chip tunes. Yes, chip tunes being music that you generate from those old eight bit machines and earlier, but things like like the cover War sixty four and stuff. You take the the chips that were able to generate tones and you repurpose them so that you program news sorts of music that those devices were never necessarily meant to produce back in

the day. But it does produce that very, very distinctive sound that we associate with the early days of computing and video games. Yep, yep, it wasn't. It wasn't that the episode where I embarrassed myself because I had prepped by uh, listening to bags of potato chips. You can't listen to just one, that's true. I didn't learn that much.

But no, a lot of the people. Um, we didn't really get into the technology behind that as much, because I mean we did talk about how they they use UM video games in in that case as electronic instruments, but we we didn't really talk as much about building about what you need to do to make that happen. UM. One of the people that that Jonathan sort of feel pardon upon tuned me into UM hacked an at. Yes, he made the guitari dred tricks. He's an Australian. Yeah,

he's a chip tune artist from Australia. And he took an Atari twenty d Uh. He took some various electronics meant to manipulate the waveform of a sound once it's been produced. Uh, and then he creates some customized software to be able to create music using the sty And it's not it's not creating music completely improvisationally. There's some stuff that has to be pre recorded and uh, you know, predetermined, because he could not actually just produce any tone he

wanted at any time he wanted. Right now. He knows how the these initial machines. And we've talked about this too on a previous episode in which we were talking about the gaming her to wear UM. Those those early machines like the R had a library of sounds built in the machine. It was on a chip, hardwired hardwired into the chip. So um ceatrix is familiar with the hardware.

He knows what sounds are are available to him on this machine, the range of tones and volumes, and then different waveforms that the square wave UM and the different the different sounds that he can make. And so what he does is he uses a computer to write a background track basically using assembly code UM, which is a very low level programming language UM, and he's able to use.

He knows what their sounds are and he writes the software and then he ends up burning a a ROM to go into the cartridge slot on the at R. So it's just like you were putting a video game. So like let's say you want to play Pitfall and you put that into the By the way, Pitfall was an awesome game, so it was a river rate another awesome game. But you put that into your ATR bas you turn it on and then it goes well. In this case, he was creating the equivalent of a music

cartridge that you put in there. And what would happen is it would play this predetermined track, which he could then manipulate with the other electronics that he had built. And he built it on a platform that resembles this huge,

clunky guitar right now. If you if you're if you're familiar with something like Garage Band or some of these other UM basic music editing software programs, you're you're probably familiar with the idea of them saying Okay, well, we've included a hundred clips, and it'll be something really simple, basic percussion track or maybe a baseline that you can use as a baseline to write a piece of music over.

And so that's what he's including there. He'll write a basic uh if you will, something something to build on, and he'll turn on the Atari machine and it starts playing that bass track on which he can improvise playing additional notes UM he uses. There's a UM joystick attached to this UM. It looks very much like the third

party joysticks that you used. Actually may very well be I don't recognize that particular joystick, but it's got a couple of buttons on it, and he can use that to switch between tracks on the on the cartridge UM. And it's also got some effects pedals. He uh he actually used Um, I switched my notes here. Uh. He all he has an equalizer pedal built in and these are the the stump pedals, the foot pedals that that

a guitarist would use. Um that you see them switch on the floor, right, So instead of stomping on it, he's actually built these into the neck of the so he's using his hand to change the pedals as opposed to his foot. Yeah, there are three. There's an equalizer pedal or e Q. There's a flanger and a digital delay pedal which he uses with his hands. Uh, in addition to having the joystick and the atar which is at the where you would find the body of the guitar. Right.

So uh, I say we listen to a short segment of of s Tricks playing his guitar. This is him playing at a live performance in Japan, and we're just gonna give you a short little snippet to kind of let you understand what it sounds like. Uh. If your ears are sensitive, I recommend lowering the volume of your listening device. Now I'm vamping a little bit so that you can do this because it is pretty loud. But here is an example of his live performance in front

of a crowd in Japan. Yeah, that it's definitely some of the comments on his YouTube page or a little harsh. I agree that it's not necessarily everybody's style of music, but I do think that it's very, very cool what he's done there. It's kind of a mix between electronica and industrial, so I mean it's got it's got a real crunchy kind of sound to it. There are other approaches to this musical hacking that are similar to that.

There's a great term called circuit bending, which really seems to be prevalent in the UK more than in the United States. But it's the idea of using low voltage musical electronics UH that you would find in things ranging from basic video games to even electronics that you would find like in a children's toy like speaking spell and UH and then you bend. Circuit bending means you you are actually short circuiting the device and you're producing new

sounds that the device was never meant to create. A lot of people who do circuit bending will go to um uh places that offer like rift stores where you'll find a lot of old toys, and they'll go through and find and you can get that stuff for cheap at the thrift stores um or they'll go to yard sales stuff like that, and a lot of cases they will be uh, you know, not either either not functioning quite right or you know, people will give it to you for a couple of bucks and it's easy for

them to they'll they'll get several of them. In fact, I've seen the speaking spell is one of the most popular I think, or at least the ones I've seen most frequently mentioned. And they will either you know, they'll short circuits something or will short circuit a couple of boards together. They rewire some stuff, so it actually involves physically rewiring electronics. So there's often like a soldering iron is one of the basic tools in the toolkit for

someone who wants to do this. It was kind of a trend that was uh at least the whole circuit binder trend is is attributed to a fellow named Paul Norris who who found he actually used us speaking and spelling. Apparently according to the information I read from circuit benders dot co dot uk, uh, it was it was quote a chance accident with an old speaking spell machine and a soldering iron. Hey you've got a soldering iron on my speaking spell? Hey you got speaking spell on my solder?

Say and uh, but yeah, there's there's this interesting music that can be created from these electronics. And and in fact, the Circuit Benders website has a few different tracks that you can listen to. Um. So, again, these two different approaches. It's trying to achieve that similar outcome using these electronics that were uh they had sound incorporated in them from the beginning. But in order to make music, you are you're actually making it do something it wasn't intended to do.

And in fact, They Might Be Giants did a re recording of their incredible cover uh Istanbul, which is in to cover Uh. They Might Be Giants made that famous back in their Flood album. That was a fantastic cover, one of the most popular songs when they play live. I've seen Thing Might Be Giants play live many many times. I'm a huge fan. Well, they did a h they

covered it again. They did a new version of it where it was more of an electronica version yea, and they use a speaking spell in that in that version. If you listen to it, you can hear the different noises, um and uh, it's really creative, a fantastic version, and I'm sure I'll linked to that. I've already linked to the video once on the tech stuff Facebook page, but I won't hesitate to do it again because I love

the band that much. Well, they're they're kind of funny too in a way because if you know anything about the band, they started out, as you know, just the two of them, John and John, John and John, and then they added some dance. Yes, they did a band of dance, and then eventually one of the dance left and Marty came on. But yeah, when they when they first started, they were they used a lot of electron instruments and loops and things, um, and then they, if

you will, sort of went unplugged. They started using more guitars and and live drums rather than or acoustic drums rather than digital electronic drums, right, you know stuff. And that was sort of a shock for those of us were you know, fans before they used to it when it was just the two guys up on stage and then suddenly there were three other guys up there. But if you if you follow them, you've known uh for the last few years they've started experimenting with little gadgets

and gizmos and stuff and throwing things in. It's a lot of fun too. They did a cover of Chumbawemba's tub Thumping they for the A V Club and that that is phenomenal, what a wonderful, wonderful video. But they used they used devices like that as well. You know, they create some electronic music live in a in a big group of people who were all shouting the lyrics along and uh a joyous video. Absolutely love it. Um

we're where we uh moving on? UM actually sort of a hybrid instrument sort of came to me UM when I was looking at the guitar before, even when when Jonathan showed me that, he actually showed me before we had this idea for the podcast, just like, look at this thing, and I was and I was sort of fooling around with it, and I ran into UM. An

instrument created by a very well reasonably famous hacker, Jerry Ellsworth. UM. She's very hacked uh popular in the hacking community, and she's also part of Valve Software, which gaming community knows very well. Um Uh Catrix has done stuff with other machines, not just the Atari he's used UH, an Amiga and game Boy, but he's also used the Commodore sixty four and UH as an interesting tie in. UM Jerry Ellsworth used a Commodore sixty four to make a a bass guitar,

but unline what Citrix did. She actually used the neck and strings from the bass and uses the Commodore sixty four to um interpret. The strings basically used as the pickup for the bass. As most of you know, Chris and I do our research separately, so this is all new to me and my mind has just been blown. Yeah. Now, now if you if you don't know anything about how an electric guitar works and a bassis a you know, electric bass is a bass guitar. Um. They they use

the strings of a guitar. But you know, if you've ever been around one that's not plugged in, the sounds it makes are pretty quiet. Um. You know, the the mechanics of the strings are pretty much the same as you'd see in an acoustic guitar. But what an electric guitar uses along the body are those those little uh sometimes they're silver, sometimes they're darker. You'll see those little things that run exactly or not always exactly, but perpendicular to the way the strings. Um. So they they are

on the body of the guitar. Sometimes they'll be one, sometimes they'll be two or three. Um. Sometimes I've seen I have friends who are musicians who hacked their own guitars and will change out. These are called pickups, and what these do is they basically interpret the sounds of They turned the acoustic vibrations into electron electric symbols, signals, signals,

differently different symbols. Um, a little percussive memory there, right, So, yeah, they turned them into electric signals which travel along the cable and into really now, they could be plugged directly into a computer, but traditionally they're plugged into an amplifier

and that's how you can manipulate the signals. Well. Jerry Ellsworth has employed the use of a Commodore sixty four, has done some hacking on the device itself to allow her to to use the Commodo or sixty four as a effectively as the pickup for this electric bass and um, she that means she can use this to play you know. Basically, any bass guitarist could pick this device up and play a song on it. You know, in the traditional fashion and have it turned out as uh an eight bit sound.

She can use um uh the device to play eight bit sounds or or something a little bit closer to the traditional electric bass sound. UM. Some of the keys function um as a key tar. Um. You know which is that uh, depending on how you look at it, really cool or really cheesy, really cool, That's how I see it. Uh. Where where was the body of the device was a keyboard, but there is a neck where you can manipulate the sounds. And this is what we're

talking about. There is a professionally engineered, manufactured device where it is supposed to do all those things. Um. She sort of made her own uh bass guitar um hacked keytar device and it's just very very cool. There are videos online you actually, uh it's probably too much to do a clip of, but I would certainly encourage you to check out the videos of her playing this instrument, because, UM, there's really a lot that that she did to make

this work. Of course, then again, she's known for building race car chassis when she was in her teens and twenties, so you figure she's probably pretty good at this. So I kind of hate her actually, it's more envy than hate. Yes, I envy her her ingenuity and skill astely. Hey there, it's Jonathan from two thousand nineteen here to tell you. We're gonna get into some more discussion about music in just a second, but first let's take a quick break.

There's actually a contest that or a competition that I did not even know about until we started recording this. And my ignorance is something I'm kicking myself over because ignorance not so much bliss. In two thousand nine, uh,

there was the first government musical instrument competition. All right, So this was a competition for designers to create musical instruments using technology and interesting ways, and they would, uh, they would submit them to this competition, and the winner of the competition would win a certain amount of money. That first year, it was a ten thousand dollar uh, ten thousand dollars for all of the different prizes. In first place would take five thousand of that, so ten

thousand dollars. So two thousand nine was when they first had it. And you know where it's located down the street, down the freaking street over and Georgia Tech. So Georgia Tech, Atlanta, we're in Atlanta. We we are in Buckhead in Atlanta, which is so when we say down the street, it's actually a little further than just down the Street's not like a block or two away, but it's easily Yeah, it's like it's like two train stops and we are

next to a train station. So anyway, it's really really accessible from where we are, and we have never been. We didn't even know it existed until today. And uh, the fact that this exists is now something that tells me I have to attend next year if I can, uh, if I if I've got that that day free. So I wanted to talk a little bit about some of

the devices that were submitted that first year. Yeah, absolutely, And the nice thing is is that we can actually play a little bit of the music that these devices generated. Will have some clips as well. So the first one, the one that actually won the prize in two thousand nine, was the Silent Drum, which was from a an inventor named Jamie Oliver, but not the Naked Chef, not that

Jamie Oliver. Jamie Oliver. I have to say though that the name of the instrument sort of reminds me of a title of a mystery science theater or three thousand video. Oh yeah, silent drum. Silent It makes me think of what all people who live with a drummer wishes the drummer would own as a drummer. Yes, okay, so silent drum is. Well. They in the on the side they actually talk about it being a kind of like using

shadow puppetry to create music. This really cool thing. All right, So you've got this this device where you've got uh uh light that is projected from the bottom of the device up to the top of the top has a membrane across it that acts as that what would be the drumhead, but you're not striking it like a drum. Instead, you're pressing down on the membrane. You're creating a shadow. There's also a camera that detects where that shadow is.

The cameraston signals to this processor that has specialized software on it built by Oliver that interprets the shadow as a command to create a certain kind of sound. So depending on where in the membrane you touch, that's going to determine the sound that comes out, and how deep you go changes the quality of the sound, whether or not it's going to be allowed one versus a quiet one, and you can create this weird, weird soundscape this way, and we can actually play a little bit of that.

So here is a short clip of Oliver demonstrating the silent drum, and if you get a chance to look at the YouTube video, I highly recommend it because he adds a lot of theatricality to his performance. So here we go. Now, that was what took home first prize that year, and there were many other uh uh submissions that you can look at, and I picked out a couple of others to talk about some that we can listen to, not all of them. We don't have video or audio clips of all of them, but I can

play some of the stuff. One of them is called the Guitar Bot, which took second place that year. I was developed by Eric Singer and uh it forms guitar parts for the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. It's a robotic guitarist and uh he actually used four separate robots that each had a single string. Alright, so imagine think about like the four guitar necks side by side, but there's no there's only one string on each one.

And then instead of there being frets all the way down the neck of the guitar, there's only one fret, but the fret can move up and down the length of the string, so it changes the pitch of the note that that string produces because the fret self relocates to make the string the right length to create the

pitch you want. And then at the base of each string, there's a little circular drum that has on it four picks mounted to the drum, so when the drum turns, the pick picks the the string, and you can turn the wheel a very specific number of times to to do the the equivalent of finger picking really or you could turn it really quickly so that it's just playing faster than any human being with the possible exception of

certain members of Van Halen, could ever accomplish. And so uh, it's it's really interesting to watch this work as well, because you actually see the frets going up and down those strings to generate the tunes that that you hear from it. And here is a short sample of the guitar bot that actually sort of reminds me if you've looked at it. Um Uh. The video company named Anna Music. Have you ever seen those UM They used to be

advertised on on TV a lot. Basically, they do UM three D videos of music and it's it's all MIDI type, you know, it's all C G I. But the UM the music is when you look at the video, it's created by these fantastic instruments, things that are are essentially robotic in character, and uh, you know they're playing these all sorts of otherworldly you know, they're playing themselves basically,

and watching that just reminded me of one of the instruments. Uh. And there are actually probably several of the instruments, so which is kind of cool. Yeah. There there are so many that were submitted that year that I thought were really interesting to the submitted to the competition. Another one was well. Third place went to David Wessel, who was a Berkeley University professor, so a guy who knows what he's doing. And he had an instrument that he introduced

called the slabs. So you know a lot of laptops

have those have touch pads. He did what he did was he took a bunch of those touchpads more than thirties I recall, and made an array of touch pads and each touch pad was capable of producing certain tones based upon where your finger was on that on that touch pad and how much pressure you were putting on the touch pad, and all of the information was fed through a device that was running the max slash MSP audio program, and he would be able to create music

by moving his fingers along these different touchpads and could create a pretty sophisticated range of sounds. I mean, they were essentially ninety six channels for this device, so lots of lots of options. And uh and here's a little sample of the professor playing along on slabs. M m m m m m m hm. Now that's pretty cool. Chris is gonna keep the beat, keep it strong in just a moment. But first let's take another quick break. If you want something that sounds a little more primitive,

here's another. This this will be our final little sound clip. But here's one that I wanted to talk about. A guy named Neil Feathers created an instrument called vibra wheels. Yeah, so he he creates the sound by rotating these discs that have within it some vibrating pellets. So the vibrating pellets are making this certain noise, and then by rotating it, you're creating this kind of Doppler effect, and by rotating

a different speeds you can actually alter the pitch. Uh. And then there are batteries that are supplying the power and to create the music, you run it at different speeds. Uh and it Uh they're going past guitar pickups, like you were saying, that's what that's what's ended up interpreting these vibrations and turning it into electric signals, which then can go to an amplifier, which then can send an amplified signal to speakers and then they get to hear them.

And I can talk all about the physical abilities of sound, but we've done that in previous podcasts. We're not gonna cover it. But anyway, so moving this around and around, you can make them go in and out of phase. These different rotating disks that have these vibrating pellets and batteries on them. Um, that's what creates the sound. And UH they say that the the the inspiration for this instrument came from a motorcycle engine. And I think you're

gonna understand what they meant. When you hear and on lead motorcycle, it's could you imagine, Um, yeah. So. Actually, so I was a finalist for that first competition over at Georgia Tech, which has gone on every year since including there was one in as well, So hopefully in because we're recording this in twelve, hopefully I'll be able to attend that one and see these things in person, because I'm finding it really fascinating. There was another one that I don't have a sound clip for, but the

idea was just so wild to me. Uh Katherine stone Rich. She created this device that used lasers, so you know I was gonna love it anyway, right, But they used lasers that would detect the texture of various fabrics, So we're talking about the thread count or the thickness of that fabric or even wherever the seams are in that fabric, and through the various changes in that detect it would

send signals that would create music. So you would actually feed fabric through this machine and the output would be music. You could compose a symphony, essentially an electronic symphony, by weaving fabric and changing the pattern of the weave. That's unbelievable. Okay, So I think we're gonna end this podcast right here. One good pun just destroys the whole thing. Yeah, it just comes apart at the seams. I'm hurting and I

need to seek medical attention. So oh man, all right, I'm gonna sew this up right now and we're going to finish this by podcast. I think Jonathan's going to spindle me. There's that didn't even make sense. I'm gonna, you know, like the kind that goes on a never mind you know what after this, I'm gonna tell you a yarn that has been in the back of my mind for ages. Sorry I didn't that's a totally different thread. Sorry guys. Um, I don't mean to needle Chris in

this way. See two can play at that game, Mr Palette. Okay, so we're wrapping this out honestly, Um, the realm of music and hacking is a rich one. There. There are incredible examples of ingenuity and musicality out there, some of which are higher on the ingenuity part and less on the musicality, but there's some. There's some incredible examples of people really putting their minds to new ways to create music,

and it's it blows my mind. Uh, as someone who appreciates music but is still very much a novice As far as making music, I find it amazing. Well, it's one thing to uh to have something like pro tools to record uh analog instruments or something like Sabelius to write scores on your on your computer, but UM, it's kind of interesting to see how people are taking other

things and making music out of it. I'm you know, I'm thinking along the lines of people like uh Ben burt Over at introduct industrial light and magic making sound effects out of found objects and things like that. It's just UH need to see people making things make music you wouldn't ordinarily see. And there you haven't folks, another classic episode of tech Stuff. Hope you enjoyed that episode.

If you have any suggestions for future topics or you want to hear more about the intersection between music and technology, send me a message. You can reach out on email the addresses text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or pop onto our social media sites and let us know. There. You can actually find links to those at our website tech stuff Podcast dot com. You can let me know if there's any particular topics you would like me to

look into. I look forward to hearing from you. Also on that website, you will find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon. Ye hext Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.