Axis Mundi

After being asked to produce an audio installation for a festival celebrating the 8th birthday of Callshop Radio, my good friend Lennart Posch and I got together to conceptualize this project. We decided to build a sonic sculpture that would process and sonify the electromagnetic interferences in the room.
I had already been digging myself into the rabbit hole of point-to-point-soldering, strongly inspired by the works of Peter Vogel and Iona Vreme Moser.
So I started the building process, while Lennart planned the staging and scenic elements.
He invited the phenomenal bass-baritone Thomas Huy to perform with the sculpture on the day of the festival, which worked wonderfully. In order for that to work, I mixed Thomas’ vocals with the EMF signals in the processing stage.
An old valve radio would serve as a base for the sculpture and as a source of strong EMI.

Build

I copied the circuit of the Electrosluch Mini City® for the input stage of the sculpture and designed a layout:

P2P layout of the Electrosluch for the input stage

I did the same with the Ruby Guitar Amp® for the output stage:

P2P layout of the Ruby guitar amp

For the processing (between input -and output-stage) I used a RaspberryPi® running a custom SuperCollider sketch.

Pics:

© Flor de Fuego – @flordefuega

© Thomas Schoger – @schogette_