RGV

RGV was an interactive quadraphonic sound installation that I collaborated on with cognitive scientist and linguist Alyssa Ibarra for the LOOPS show at Visual Studies Workshop that ran from Sept 7th-13th 2018 here in Rochester. This page will provide some rambling technical information that would have been inappropriate to make viewers suffer through at an art show.

TL;DR: There are no synthesizer sounds on this page

Video documentation

Tweaked Four Track

Fancy Automated 4x4 Matrix Mixer

As befitting the premise of this group show, RGV explored "the loop" as heard by the listener in perceptually distinct ways: a static tape loop that is never experienced the same way twice.

I hacked the monitoring aux send circuits of an old Fostex 4 track cassette recorder to get individual outputs for each track and connected these to a fancy automated 4x4 matrix mixer based on vactrols and controlled by a convoluted 16 bit shift register conveyor belt circuit. The toggle switches let you flip the clock and data inputs, split the two halves of the shift register network (into two separate 8 bit SRs that can be driven at different rates yet still cascaded... don't ever try this with a real conveyor belt) and loop the data. The push button resets the shift register and dumps its contents onto the factory floor (again, probably not recommended for real world applications).

There are also 4 differently weighted DACs that produce control voltages based on the bit patterns. They were ultimately unused in the installation, but I couldn't resist adding them to explore later. These outputs can produce very interesting stepped voltages for controlling other equipment, especially when the two halves of the shift register system are running out of sync.

The majority of the shift register wrangling tweaks are inspired by Doc Mabuse's Goldberg Function Generator (the ancestor of the Wiard Noisering) and the overarching concept of a vactrol-based matrix mixer was inspired by Grant Richter's Electro-Optical Mixer.

Here's an out of date block diagram:

Modified Grackler with oversized knobs

Okay, now the shift register circuit gets its clock and data inputs from a modified version of the Grackler that has huge wooden knobs that viewers were encouraged to twiddle. The Grackler had been on my backburner for a while awaiting redesign for more sensible assembly and slowly collecting new features along the way. This was a good opportunity to re-contextualize the Grackler to help me explore some new possibilities for its future. This Grackler was designed to run much slower than the old production model as I was interested in getting it to produce LOOONG evolving patterns that changed over the course of a week. The chaotic nature of the Grackler worked well for this. Coupled with the delay imparted by the shift register circuits, some of the behaviors appeared to last for hours. Some viewers were convinced that it wasn't doing anything at all because their knob tweaks didn't take effect until later that day and the results of their tweaks were then experienced by future visitors.

The tape loop itself was created by Alyssa Ibarra and was composed of four channels of spoken descriptions of trees native to the lower Rio Grande Valley, recorded in both English and Spanish. These source recordings were chopped up, muted and panned across a four channel speaker array and spoke to the linguistic fluidity of the border region, grounded in the specifics of the environment.

I had a blast working on this project and am always interested in opportunities to do more work in this vein in the future.