This is a object i build for a exhibition that was organized for the 77th birth day of Paul Panhuysen. The Exhibition website can be found here.

Paul Panhuysen seems to like abstract and drony sounds and when i visited him i noticed he also likes the song of birds. The device i made can make both drony sounds and high frequency birsts of arpegiating tones.. so i thought it fits quite well. It can also physical move and the sounds it makes change when you move the object and for some reason i also think this fits.

Originaly the idea for this device came when helping a student at the merz academy in creating a synth from a hard disc. In the begining of the workshop i showed this video, and also how to make a sine wave oscillator from the HD.. Then the student found this tutorial in making a rotary encoder from a old hard disc..

Looking at the scope part sparked the idea to make a arpeggiator from this HD.. the three signals appearing in a nice pattern just ideal for making chiptune style chords.. These type of chords are basically 3 different pitches that are played at high speed in sequence after each-other, to make it appear as a chord.. The reason for this is that the hardware could just play a few, or no notes at the same time.. and this would save space for more other sounds to be played at the same time.

medium-pitch-analog-hd-01

In this case the HD spins and chiptune style chords are only heard when spun at high speed. When spun at low speed or when short movements are mode with the HD, the 3 comparators can turn on or off by 2 at a time also, which gives some nice extra sort of randomness..

One of the comparators also acts as a master gate/envelope. So the sounds can fade or stay on permanently depending on which oscillator is selected.

low-pitch-analog-hd-01

Because the device is close to the wall and the speaker is not cased, the sounds will cancel themself via the wall. I made this into a feature by connecting a hinge to the right side of the device, so it can be moved to ← and → from the wall giving a nice effect to the sound, depening on the distance from the wall. This effect works best on low frequencies and when two notes are on at the same time.

The idea for island soldering comes from here.. it is a nice way to solder stuff into any surface. I soldered it in such a way that that the components look like they are thrown in.

Schematic is a bit unclear..