[MUSIC PLAYING]
IAN HATTWICK: Music tech at the Voxel Lab
is really engaged with this idea of how
do creativity engineering and musical practice come together.
For many of our students, they have an understanding
of computational systems or they have an understanding
of mechanical or electronic design
that they very naturally want to use to create things.
We're really here to support them in that.
Whether it's people coming in and adding electronics
to an acoustic instrument or people coming in
and designing modifications or hacking on existing
electronic music systems or people coming in
and creating something brand new from the ground up,
it's amazing for students to come
and be able to follow their own creative muse.
MATTHEW CAREN: The funny thing about music tech
is that you're kind of pursuing two things at the same time.
You're pursuing the can I make this technical system
function and this pursuit of what could I create with this?
What is this inspiring right now as I'm
listening to what it's doing?
And sometimes they affect each other in ways
that you are not really sure of you might kind of think
that you broke something technically,
but it ends up artistically being
something really interesting.
Currently I am building a fuzz pedal
that you hear in a lot of rock music and blues music.
This is a funny discussion, the very fact
that we're building a fuzz pedal, because the fuzz pedal
happened by accident.
We put too much power in something
that didn't want that much power and we
were like, oh, that actually sounds kind of cool.
And now we do it on purpose.
[PLAYING GUITAR]
IAN HATTWICK: This is in its own way is a research lab, right?
This is a lab that has a bunch of facilities
for exploring technology and examining sort of things
as they're in the process of being created.
So the focus here is definitely on exploring what's new
and exploring new possibilities.
And that's actually a very easy thing to do.
Every small change that we make to an instrument
dramatically transforms how that instrument
might be appreciated, how that instrument might be used.
Something like digital instrument design
is a particularly challenging course,
because we're engaging with lots of different topics.
We're engaging with electronics and working with sensors.
We're engaging with programming and then
we're engaging with sound design and performance.
JOSEPH NTAIMO: So I've been working on a capaciharp .
I'm on version 4.3.
It's a stringed instrument where each string
maps to a different voice, a different pitch.
And the strings are actually wires
which use capacitive sensing to change
the amplitude of each voice.
I made this because I wanted to make something that's
capable of polyphonic sound.
But I'm a violinist myself, so I'm really used to one note
at a time, maybe two if I want to spice things up.
And I made my instrument so you can
change the scale in real time to adjust to whatever piece
you're playing with.
So maybe when I'm DJing, because I'm also a DJ,
I can switch to whatever key the piece is in
and play along with it.
JOYCE YUAN: My instrument is called marbulous
in the nature of fun and play.
It's supposed to be the idea of a Rube Goldberg music
maker where the marble kind of rolls down and triggers
each successive little sequence.
My little marbles right here are magnetic.
And if they do come close to one of the read switches, what
happens is the sensors trigger the Arduino, which
sends messages to Python, which sends messages to GarageBand
to make the sound happen.
I'm not a music tech major.
I'm a computer science and math major
and this was something that I took for fun.
I deal with so much numbers and code all the time,
but I don't really deal with code that makes music.
And so it was a really cool experience
to get to try that out for the first time.
NINA MASUELLI: Let me make this a little bit more obnoxious.
In some ways, Voxel is as much a maker space
as it is just a playground where you're not really
expected to fit one discipline or one mold,
which is really useful to someone like me who
loves to combine all my different interests.
I love visual art.
I love sewing.
I love fabricating things.
But also I'm a musician.
It's a very inspiring environment.
IAN HATTWICK: It encourages us to think about perception.
When we're engineering systems, we're
embedding within them the ideas and the concepts that we're
using to frame the world.
And I really love to see students
begin an awareness of that and see them really
push their own boundaries in terms of what is possible
and what is beautiful.
Some of the projects that come out in the digital instrument
design in particular can be extremely experimental
and present extremely different views of what
a musical performance might be.
And really when you get to the point
when you can find the strengths of an instrument which come out
of its idiosyncratic qualities, that's
when you're really going to find something special.
And when you can find a way of expressing
your own sort of sense of musical meaning
and musical structure through that,
that's when you get to real moments of beauty.