ElectronicosFantasticos

June 28, 2020 8:03 AM

Ei Wada and collaborators make delightful musical instruments by hacking familiar, analog consumer electronics.
posted by eotvos (8 comments total)

Delightful.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:23 AM on June 28, 2020

In grad school, and friend and I were trying to set up a piece of custom electronics on a CRT screen to measure the timing of precisely when the beam passed across part of the screen using a photodiode. During testing, we hooked the output up to a speaker and discovered that we'd created an analog instrument kind of similar to (but much simpler than) the ones on display here. It was some of the most fun I had in grad school.
posted by biogeo at 10:43 AM on June 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

So cool!
posted by gwint at 11:10 AM on June 28, 2020

In grad school, and friend and I were trying to set up a piece of custom electronics on a CRT screen to measure the timing of precisely when the beam passed across part of the screen using a photodiode

Hmmm! I wonder if you could use the old Duck Hunt / Namco shooting game guns for this? There's probably a really neat Guitar Hero / shooting game mashup game you could make with something like this...
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:15 PM on June 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Well that was very cool.
posted by vernondalhart at 12:24 PM on June 28, 2020

This is fantastic! Thanks for posting.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:44 AM on June 29, 2020

Sugoi! A friend of mine would make beats with an old gameboy, so I'm sure you could "hack" those duck hunt guns to make some sick jamz. This reminds me of that movie Sound of Noise.
posted by nikoniko at 3:24 PM on June 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

I love the duck hunt idea. Someone who isn't me should spend a week doing that!

There are many bad things one can say about twitter. But, learning about these artists because they were retweeted by a Japanese playground architecture blogger who I learned about because they were retweeted by an amateur London Underground documentarian who I learned about because they were retweeted by a museum in a city where I've never lived is pretty cool. And, despite its flaws, machine translation sure is helpful. (1.7 languages is hard enough for me. I'm in awe of people who can manage more.)
posted by eotvos at 4:35 PM on June 30, 2020