This year we have been collaborating with Joanne Cox as part of a team of artists, producers, and access specialists, to produce a set of interactive video pages, including a small selection of virtual instruments. Please watch the video below to learn more, and try the instrument out for yourself.
Play the instrument here: blurringtheboundaries.org/dyj-october/
Fill out the feedback form here: DYJ feedback form (please let us know if this form is not accessible to you)
This post is a work in progress and will be updated as we are able to upload new footage from our archives…
Our frequent collaborator and newly appointed project partner Joël Dazé has been getting to know our custom boards following a brief development session last year.
The result: the beginnings of a new instrument he calls the Octobox, featuring eight light sensors currently mounted to a cardboard box as a chassis. Shining light onto each sensor fades in the sound of a musical note through a website.
Joël has plans to create a custom chassis to make this a more permanent instrument, but it also represents a prototype and conversation-starter for future sensor-based instruments to be developed in workshops.
You can check out some of Joël’s development footage in the video below.
Video access: closed captions in English, currently no audio description.
Scene: Joel’s workspace featuring a desk with a cardboard box, a circuit board around the size of a mobile phone with holes in the shape of figure of eights to enable crocodile clip connections, and eight light sensors connected via crocodile clips.
If you’re interested in finding out more or would be interested in hosting a workshop using this kind of approach, please leave a comment on the YouTube video.
The circuit board sends out MIDI by default, which means it can either trigger musical notes or move virtual faders. At Blurring the Boundaries, we tend to gravitate towards the kind of expression you can get from a continuous control, meaning that our default is to map the intensity of light from a sensor to the dynamics of a tone — making a digital equivalent of perhaps a violin bow or a theremin, rather than a piano.
Since we started our work during the pandemic, we’ve also become accustomed to controlling music through the browser, and it’s just as natural for us to send information over the internet as it is to make sound in the same room. This also means that although we’re located in different cities, we can continue developing the software side of the instrument in between our in-person meetings.
Here’s a quick clip from one of our remote development sessions, in which each light sensor in Ottawa controls the volume of an individual note on a computer in Montreal.
Video access: closed captions in English, currently no audio description.
Scene: a messy desk featuring a screen with Charles and Joel on a Zoom call, alongside a website with eight coloured boxes that respond to the volume of eight musical notes. Joel is shining a flashlight into an array of light sensors, while Charles is editing code in another window.
The circuit board used to gather information from the sensors is a custom PCB we have been working with for the last few years. Like Joël, we’ve been using these in workshops as the heart of various prototype musical instruments, with light sensors, arcade buttons, faders, dials, joysticks, and other components. The typical approach is to prototype as quickly as possible by raiding our recycling for supplies on the way out — cereal boxes, tin foil, and poster tubes are firm favourites — and cutting holes to insert the sensors and mount the circuit boards. The next step (unless cardboard is preferred, which is of course perfectly valid!) can be to replace the crocodile clips with soldered connections, and move the housing to 3D printed or laser cut enclosures. At this point, the design can be refined, and the sensors can be fine-tuned or replaced. Depending on the boards used inside a given project, the whole instrument can be self contained with an internal synthesiser or sampler connected to an audio jack or a built-in speaker for around $200. For a more cost-effective solution (as affordable as $20 in some cases), a USB cable or Bluetooth can connect to a computer to create a MIDI controller.
Our approach was inspired by open source off-the-shelf solutions like the Bare Conductive Touch Board and the MaKey MaKey, which both feature access points for crocodile clips or banana clips…or even conductive thread and paint, to trigger events on a computer. In the case of the MaKey MaKey, this enables an on-off, whereas on the Touch Board, it’s possible to measure a continuous movement from a capacitive sensor (a bit like having twelve theremins at your disposal).
These boards are particularly great for education and rapid prototyping of musical instruments. Our aim is to get practical and experiential with playing straight away, as much as demystifying the technology. And in the spirit of “blurring the boundaries”, we’ve found the most engagement through a fluid hands-on approach to sculpting the physical object, be it out of tin foil or cardboard, helps build ownership, understanding, and that all important sense of play. Having simple crocodile clip connections enables us to focus on what you could describe as a more access-oriented way in to building a custom instrument…how it’s shaped, how you interact with it…hopefully challenging expectations around the emphasis on technicality over musicality and personality.
But it’s a bit more complicated to connect something less conventional like a light sensor — it involves creating a circuit known as a voltage divider, and while this is one of the simpler circuits out there, there are already a few potential barriers as we ask musicians to start getting to know bread boards and resistors before we can even make a sound. Not to mention juggling eight of those. The result? Well, maybe we’ll be making music at the end of a weekend-long workshop…and guests often come away thinking they need a degree in electronics to make something outside mainstream solutions.
So we wanted a board that would provide the same crocodile clip connections to measure analog signals from these sensors, so we went ahead and created our own “shields” to fit on top of existing boards. Our boards can currently be used with Arduino, Micro:Bit, and Bela. Please get in touch if you would like to check them out — we are currently in the process of making the source available.
The boards feature artwork, including representations of ourselves and collaborating artists in the studio — our way of emphasising that this technology is a means to make music, to communicate…and that while we’re connecting sensors, the human connections are the most important….
Blurring the Boundaries Arts were recently involved in an access review for the Gamelan Room website created by UK organisation Good Vibrations.
During this project, we worked with consultant Jason Dasent to review screen reader access for the web app, as well as a general introduction for screen reader users. This gave us an opportunity to continue research we have been conducting for CAMIN on hosting online sessions, including meetups and hackathons.
This is the first video created by Jason:
This is a preview of our new podcast, in which we speak with people who are blurring the boundaries between the roles of artists, makers, musicians, dancers, coders…
In this part of the conversation, we got into some of the reasons Joanne had chosen to feature bed bugs in her pieces…and this led to some insight into challenges facing Disabled people in Britain at the moment.
0:43
Jo: The bedbugs, they symbolise anything that represses people, and that people have to fight against.
Things that drain you because they literally suck your blood.
0:59
So anything that drains you of life, that’s what the bedbugs represent.
1:07
And in this story, for Disabled people in the UK, there’s assessments by the Department of Work and Pensions for welfare benefits.
1:24
And they’re handed over to private medical companies that … er … have lost their moral compass [laughs].
And it’s a lot about profiteering.
1:39
And the assessments, they’re not really fit for purpose.
They’re often flawed.
There’s a lot of mistakes made, and also the whole process is extremely biassed in favour of not giving the award.
2:01
It’s very stressful. And if you lose the welfare benefit, or if it’s not awarded, then you have an appeals process, which is very bureaucratic, and very difficult.
2:19
It’s practically impossible without any support.
And it’s very hard to get that support, often.
And for many people it’s too much for them.
They cannot go through the process.
2:36
And sadly, it’s left a lot of people living in really bad poverty, and thousands of people have actually died in relation to welfare benefit assessments.
2:53
Yeah, so the bed bugs represent profiteering companies that are basically profiteering from Disabled people, and causing them a lot of stress.
3:11
So that’s one thing that the bedbugs represent.
In UK, for mental health system survivors, there’s also the recovery model.
And that’s become … it’s been hijacked as a cost cutting thing and a reason to take away services.
3:38
And it’s become a cure, a false cure that’s saying, "Oh yeah, you’re all better now". Because you’ve done you know, 10 minutes of CBT or whatever.
3:50
It oppresses people from becoming, growing into their real authentic self .. and it’s crushing all the great things about their neurodivergence.
It’s basically about fitting in.
So that’s like, an attack, and that’s very draining as well.
4:08
So that’s what the bedbugs represent to me.
I connected them with bedbugs because somebody who I won’t name, but they brought bed bugs to my flat by accident!
4:26
And so, you have to put the poison down. And you have to lie down asleep on the floor. And then they walk across the poison.
And that’s how you get rid of them… they walk…you have to lie there and attract them.
And you just feel completely powerless.
4:45
Gift: good god
4:47
Jo: because you know you’re going to sleep as bait for these bedbugs to come and bite you.
So, it felt very much the same as going through these awful assessments.
Meet the team and find out more about Joanne’s artistic practice at cello.joannesonia.live
This is a preview of our new video podcast, in which we speak with people who are blurring the boundaries between the roles of artists, makers, musicians, dancers, coders…
It’s about being in a sort of protective veil of mysterious light. And it’s to do with a part of neurodivergence…it is rarely talked about, like, the positive side of it.
Joanne Cox
Toward the start of the conversation we got to talk about some of the ideas behind these pieces. It quickly spread out into thoughts about neurodiversity and music…how other aspects can take priority, and how collaboration between different media can bring unexpected results as we might not always understand the communication going on.
A transcription of the conversation is available by tapping on “show transcript” below.
1:25
Jo: The opening piece stems from when I first jammed with Charles with colour and the cello.
So Charles was making the cello notes into colour in a studio and it just changed the way I played.
1:48
[soft cello music interwoven with the pulsating light on the video]
2:26
Jo: Yeah, it was like you said, Gift. It was quite a spiritual, soulful experience.
There’s something about light and colour that is very soulful.
So that the first piece, the UK Tree Path and the Canada Tree Walk, it’s the Dragon Cello lighting up these these lights. and it’s just spiritual and soulful and exploring, and mysterious.
2:58
And it’s about being in a sort of protective veil of mysterious light. And it’s to do with a part of neurodivergence.
I mean, I can only speak for myself, because everyone experiences it differently.
But it is rarely talked about, like, the positive side of it. And it’s about the positive side of being more sensitive.
3:31
Charles: Personally, I felt really strongly connected to that, that way of, I don’t know, playing with the sound and then producing light from that.
It takes me back to why I started doing things like this in the first place.
Because it often involves something like a computer or circuit boards, or whatever.
But really, it’s just that these are the best ways I find to make something that doesn’t fit into the usual the usual norms of how we experience music.
I love stuff that’s got a continuum, say, from sound down into feeling and bass.
And when we think about vibration separately, if people are talking about kind of vibrating objects, coming from a dance music perspective,
I’m thinking well, that that’s just what we were doing back in the day, that’s just, you know…
we would be seeking to make stuff that was more like a roller coaster than a track, or something like that.
4:28
Jo: Yeah. [laughs]
4:29
Charles: And, and the light in particular, I remember wanting to get into this as a teenager, wanting to make music.
I wanted to make something that would not just take you somewhere else but maybe make people hallucinate or something.
And how would you do that through sound? How could you really play with it?
And it’s quite funny now, kind of, much, much later on, realising that music can do things to you.
And like, if it’s making you hallucinate, then that’s on the surface.
It’s like, there’s some kind of really deep change that might be taking place.
And something like this can maybe help understand that with the verbal communication on something, which usually takes priority, like I think you mentioned earlier, on Kate, there’s a different way of communicating that we might not be aware of.
5:19
There are these different ways that we can maybe draw people into that and one of them is through producing this light, and this kind experience that we’re not going to necessarily understand.
But when you’re in the room, developing it together, it’s like there’s something that neither of you are necessarily putting into it.
It feels like there’s something emerging from that, that you don’t have control of… or … maybe I just don’t… I don’t know.
5:42
Jo: Yeah! [laughs in agreement]
5:47
Kate: I love your description of making a roller coaster, not just a track, like it’s like a full body experience.
5:55
Jo: Yeah
5:56
Kate: And I do feel that way when I’m listening to Jo’s cello.
Because in my neurodivergent world I would live very much in my head, and my body sometimes almost feels like a different country that I cross the border to go into to do the things I need to do, like use my hands.
So when when I can feel the music in sort of my whole body it’s quite like “oh, wow, I’ve got a body!”
So yeah, I sort of relate to what you’re saying about that, more than just going in your ears and being processed in that kind of way that we normally think of music.
6:32
Charles: I don’t remember where I got this but somebody said “sound is essentially an extension of touch”.
It’s like touch long distance and whether we’re hearing that or feeling that, it kind of says to me sometimes sound can be like time travel as well, if you’re listening a to recording…
6:50
Jo: yeah,
6:51
Charles: yeah, just crossing over and not keeping things in one narrow box.
Meet the team and find out more about Joanne’s artistic practice at cello.joannesonia.live
This is a preview of our new video podcast, in which we speak with people who are blurring the boundaries between the roles of artists, makers, musicians, dancers, coders…
We were overjoyed to be able to invite our friends and collaborators Joanne Cox and Kate Lovell on as our first guests. Joanne has been working on the research and development two main projects over the last few years: Defiant Journey and Define Your Journey.
Defiant Journey is a stage show incorporating music (with Joanne’s Dragon Cello filling the space), interactive electronics with vibrations, movement, sign interpretation, and plenty of opportunities to get involved. It’s all about the experience of being a Neurodivergent/Disabled artist in our current time.
Define Your Journey is an interactive online experience which grew out of Defiant Journey during the pandemic. It follows the same themes, uses the same music, but the creative process of bringing this work online, including our cross-continental collaboration, has really changed the shape.
Over the next few posts we’ll be highlighting some key moments from our conversation, before we release the full hour-long episode. And watch this space for more opportunities to start new collaborations!
This is a preview of screen reader access for the bed bug scene in Define Your Journey:
It’s very much work in progress — watch this space for more information!
Blurring the Boundaries have teamed up with the National accessArts Center in Calgary to develop a series of workshops.
Watch and listen to a collaborative piece developed in week 2:
Play along with the video using an embedded instrument:
These instruments have been developed based on ideas and code in Joanne Cox’s Define Your Journey project.
Aimee Louw and Gift Tshuma discuss movement with guests Karine-Myrgianie Jean-François, Barak adé Soleil, and Leroy Moore.
This episode resonated particularly strongly with us!
