experimental audio

2 Articles

Tunes You Can Eat

December 14, 2020 by 15 Comments

This week retro-gadget collector and video blogger [Techmoan] featured perhaps the most delicious audio recording format that we know of — a chocolate gramophone record. (Video, embedded below.) Compared to his typical media format explorations, the chocolate record is of quite recent vintage. He first heard of them back in 2015 when Tasmanian artist [Julia Drouhin] offered chocolate recordings as part of her art project. The one that [Techmoan] finally obtained was from a UK chocolatier who offers them with custom labelling and your choice of two songs. There are some pointers in the video about how to playback your chocolate disk without ruining it (use the lightest stylus tracking force as possible). These disks are recorded at 45 RPM on one side only, and are about the same size as a standard single. But being about five times thicker, they pack a lot more calories than your typical phonograph disk.

No reflection on the Tewkesbury Town Band, but this is probably the lowest fidelity recording media ever, but at least you can eat it when you’re done listening — label and all. We hope the Mission Impossible movie producers are paying attention so we can see the secret audio briefing being eaten instead of going up in smoke next film.

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Build Your Own Elektrosluch 2 And Save €45

March 12, 2014 by 51 Comments

[Jonas] over at LOM Instruments is running an Indiegogo campaign for his newest creation, Elektrosluch 2. Like it’s predecessor, Elektrosluch 2 is a means to listen to the electromagnetic sounds of the world around you. Fans, computers, cell phones, routers, and just about anything electronic create strange and interesting sounds when probed with Elektrosluch 2. The campaign seems to be doing well enough with its target audience of experimental music and audio folks. However at €45 ($62.37) it’s a bit pricey for our blood. Unfortunately, [Jonas] hasn’t open sourced the project. All hope is not lost though, as Elektrosluch 2 appears to be simple enough that our astute readers should be able to build their own.

The concept is easy to understand: a coil of wire placed within a magnetic field will have an induced current proportional to the strength of the field. Electric Guitar pickups operate on the same basic principles. [Jonas] appears to be using two coils – probably tuned to different frequencies. We’re talking about relatively small magnetic fields here, so the signal will need to be amplified. In the Elektrosluch 2, the amplifier is an 8 pin SOIC which we can’t quite make the label out on. A few capacitors and resistors limit the bandwidth to audio frequencies.

[Alan Yates] created a similar circuit to diagnose dead Christmas lights. In [Alan’s] case, he used a pin instead of a coil. Two transistors and a handful of discrete components performed the amplification duties.

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