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Horndog Resonator - 2015
Chaotic analog oscillator circuits, printed circuit board, power amplifier, piezo disc, wood, acrylic, Plasti-Dip, rubber balloons
Chaotic analog oscillator circuits, printed circuit board, power amplifier, piezo disc, wood, acrylic, Plasti-Dip, rubber balloons
The history of the Horndog begins in 2013. I was reading about primitive discrete transistor-based oscillators in Delton Horn's book Oscillators. Mr. Horn had some cautions about using these circuits as sound sources, claiming of one circuit "If fed through a speaker, I doubt the results will be very pleasant" and of another "If the output of this circuit is fed to a loudspeaker, the sound produced is a piercing squeal". I took this as a dare and found these circuits fascinating, quirky and extremely difficult to adjust over a wide frequency range, but by interconnecting several of them I could get incredibly rich and unpredictable results. I named the result of my experiments The Horndog.
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The original Horndog - 2013 Chaotic analog oscillator circuits, aluminum |
The Horndog was originally conceived as an electronic musical instrument for improvisation. It was composed of a web of primitive oscillators configured in predetermined and user embellished feedback loops that produce a wide variety of chaotic behavior all over the audible and inaudible frequency spectrums. The process of playing the instrument is more akin to circuit-bending than it is to traditional methods of playing a synthesizer. The user plugs a bunch of cables into a bunch of jacks and observes a bizarre series of pulses, sliding tones and high frequency noise. I randomized the arrangement of the circuit nodes above and below the panel of Horndog as well as experimented with different capacitor values to make sure that it was impossible for two Horndogs to behave the same way. No two Horndogs were alike.
I wound up building many different kinds of Horndogs. One of these was entitled Horndog Resonator and wound up in Amid/In WNY, a group art show at Hallwalls in Buffalo. This was my first opportunity to consider strategies for putting my work in the context of a gallery setting. In a room full of mostly silent visual work, I didn't want the squeals of the Horndog to permeate the space so instead of a traditional speaker I rigged up a 3 watt amplifier that drove a piezo disc which listeners would insert into their mouth to create a private listening experience by letting the Horndog resonate their skull. This expanded the idea of how every Horndog was distinct by taking a single Horndog and creating an endless variety of unique private experiences with it.
There is no documentation video or sound recordings for this work because at the time I was unaware of a way to capture audio from inside a person's skull that would filter out background noise and considered the piece as more of an ephemeral private experience for participants. Several years later the voyeur in me realizes that an additional piezo element could be used in an alternate operation mode, as a contact microphone instead of as a speaker, and affixed to a listener's head in order to capture these tiny private sonic experiences.
