Like learning Blender, I had not expected to learn coding or circuitry in this class, but I have found it interesting and fun.
As I wanted to really learn the process of what I was doing, rather than jump straight ahead to advanced experiments, I watched a long series of tutorials by Texan gentleman Paul McWhorter whose teaching style I liked. I got to tutorial 25, and by this time had continuosly added new bits to my doorbell schematic.
Civil War Doorbell is the basic blueprint for a doorbell that plays a familiar song, and detunes itself with every button press. I was influenced by William Basinski's Disintegration Loops in which a looping reel-to-reel tape wears itself out. Also to some extent, The Caretaker whose music also self-destructed into gibberish. I was interested to see at what stage of deconstruction would the tune lose all familiarity.
I chose the tune Oh Susanna, written by Steven Foster in 1847- partially because its the only song I can play on piano, but also from a favourite line from a Silver Jews song 'her doorbell plays a bar of steven foster', all about being stuck in Kentucky. I find these old songs fascinating in how they have morphed over time, and how they have stayed in regular rotation in cartoons, kids music and folk tradition.
To play music in the folk tradition, you take a well known song and make it your own- change rhythm, tempo, melody, lyrics. Pick and choose verses from different sources and make up your own.
The original Old Susanna, the first hit song in America, was originally a minstrel song with incredibly racist lyrics- a popular practice at the time. Many people are surprised when they see the original lyrics, as they were changed during the civil war, to less offensive ones in a middle-class english dialect. The song was also popular during the 1849 gold rush, and so is associated with racist southerners, Gold miners and Civil war marching songs. Many people today would know the song as an instrumental in Bugs Bunny cartoons and movie soundtracks (usually whenever a hillbilly type appears). (Oxford American, 2012).
So the choice of song fits into series thematically, as it is an ever-evolving song. Where I also fit series into this is (and forgive me) the materiality of music itself. A melody is a series of frequencies interrupted by pauses- that is how the code sees it.
I learned the frequency of each piano key I'd need for the song, assigned the numbers to variables, and got the buzzer to play them in order along with relative pauses.
I had to work out the song note by note, refining and refining until it had the tempo of the original. By making the wait times variable, I could make it slow or long.
I then got the code to subtract a random number to each frequency at the end of each loop, so that it would disintegrate. When numbers started hovering around 0, it became interesting, yet the rhythm never changed.
Later I added a potentiometre that allows you to change the pitch in real time, and a button that would play the song when pressed, rather than playing endlessly automatically.
I would like to hook it up to a real doorbell.
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
