dig333-devlog
Week 01 - DevLog
Hello world!
Outcomes
1. Follow the class presentation to create a functioning circuit on Tinkercad and link to it here.
- Link to your (publicly-accessible) https://tinkercad.com file
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/kh9Q8O9P3F4-led-9v-battery
2. Share your maths using Ohm’s law to find the resistor value for your Tinkercad circuit.
- Your response
R = V / I R = (9-2)V / 0.02A R = 7/0.02 R = 350 Ohms
3. 📚 Read Chapter 01 - A People’s History of Electronic Music (2-14) and Chapter 02 - Musical Electricity for Electrophobes (15-up to 38) in Electronic music from scratch (Pearson). Write a comment on one of Pearson’s phrases that speaks to you. (2-3 sentences)
Phrase: When you give an electron a nudge in a good conductor, the electrons will continue to hop around as long as you keep nudging. A bad conductor (also called a resistor), on the other hand, will need a much stronger nudge. If you nudge the electrons with more vigor, you’ll give those electrons a little more oomph. The worse a conductor a material is, the more you’ll have to nudge to get the same result. The scientific name for oomph is—wait for it—voltage.
I find this explanation of the function of voltage to be especially potent. Its description of how voltage interacts with the environment depending on the effectiveness of the conductor gave me a physical analogy to the function of resistance. Imagining resistance as the difficulty of electrons to spread between other atoms is very helpful. Air is intuitively a much worse conductor than salt water or copper, so it makes sense that the voltage would need to be higher to give the electrons more “oomph.”
4. Explore Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music 2.0 https://music.ishkur.com/ referenced by Pearson. Describe the influence of one genre from this guide on your current musical listening habits. (2-3 sentences)
I am a passionate fan of Techno and all of its variants, especially Hard Techno. I primarily listen to artists from the present day and 2010s, however, there are many songs from previous eras that get recycled as samples. The genre’s characteristic sawtooth kick makes the music feel as though it mirrors my heartbeat with energy and dance.
5. 🎬 Watch this introduction to Synthesizing with Moog - Lesson 1: Listening (15:33). Describe one of Robert Moog’s contributions to electronic music.
Robert Moog was a pioneer in the adoption of synthesisers for music production. His novel method of voltage control allowed synthesisers to be played like an instrument. His first synthesisers were entirely modular and allowed musicians to create custom set-ups with self-defined quantities of oscilators and envelopes. When he noticed that musicians tended to gravitate to a certain set of configurations, he created a product based around those configurations to be used in a portable manner.
6. The Moog video references ideas also presented in Pearson’s “Speaker as microphone” experiment (p.37) explain what a microphone, a speaker, and the human ear have in common? (2-3 sentences)
Microphones, speakers, and ears all convert between air movements to electrical signals, some just specialise in certain directions of conversion. However, as displayed in the “Speaker as microphone” experiment, a speaker can indeed be used as a microphone, albeit not a very good one, so long as you apply voltage signal to the back of the speaker, it can be used to monitor the motion of the drum and convert that into electrical signal due to the movement of the copper wire relative to the magnet.
7. 🎬 Explore cinematic scores and other works created by Wendy Carlos using a Moog. Paste a link to an online example and describe what you like about the composition, performance, connection to themes in the film, etc. (2-3 sentences) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5RcNuQXuR4 The soundtrack of Tron (1982) by Wendy Carlos contains powerful pieces of music that use sounds reminiscent of traditional instruments like the violin or piano alongside synth noises. Their pairing highlights the theme of the movie as the main character is transported into the mainframe of a computer to fight software to escape. Synth noises evoke the image of a computer while the traditional instruments keep the character connected to his manifest body in the physical world.
8. Fork this repository into your own Github account and enable Github Pages. Paste the link to the public repo page below (github.com)
https://github.com/kyylb/dig333-devlog/blob/main/week-01.md
9. Check the public link (the live github.io URL) to this DevLog and make sure all your content is formatted correctly. Paste the link below.
https://kyylb.github.io/dig333-devlog
10. Paste the public link (the live github.io URL) to this finished DevLog into Moodle before (by 8am) the next class.