Synth Parties and the Maker Movement
You never quite know what to expect when you walk into a TME lecture. I definitely wasn't expecting what you just watched (above)! Let me try and fill you in.
Intro to Synths
As per best practice, TME Week 11B started with some practical work. In groups of three, we were given a battery, an oscillator and a speaker. (As I found out later, these pieces came from a Little Bits Korg Synth Kit). Now I'm assuming you know what a battery and a speaker is, but let me have a go at explaining what an oscillator is.
An oscillator basically takes a direct current (DC) of electricity (in this case provided by the battery), and turns it into alternating current (AC). Now stay with me on this next bit! Sound, at a basic level, is just air vibrating. The faster the vibrations, the higher the sound. So AC creates vibrations because the waves are moving in the air. The oscillator, which has AC, has one knob, which determines how fast the current alternates. And if you plug the oscillator into a speaker, you can actually hear the current as sound.
(I feel like that was a bad explanation but hopefully it's at least a starting place. If you want some more detail, feel free to have a read of this introduction to oscillators.)
Our first task for the lecture was to arrange the battery, oscillator and speaker so that we created sound of any kind. Once we did that, we were able to add other pieces of equipment that were magnetised together. Each of these pieces would affect the sound in different ways. In the video above, I was using a delay piece and a sequencer, and you can hear the kind of things that were happening as I played with the different buttons. It was a whole lot of fun! There was also an envelope filter, which controls the attack, decay, sustain and release of notes, and there were options for square and sawtooth waves.
At the conclusion, we discussed the different musical elements of a synthesiser. I think the really fantastic thing about the Little Bits synth kit was just how easy it was to use. In our uni class we looked at the technology and specifics behind how synthesisers work, but in a classroom situation, students could very easily be introduced to synths without needing an explanation of it all (and they can do it within a browser as well, like through WebSID [pictured above]). In a way, because synthesisers have been computerised, it's relatively easy to begin to use them inside programs like Logic and Ableton, but the Little Bits synth kit allows you to get to the real basics of manipulating sound in a really hands-on way. One day if I work at a school with a big budget, I would absolutely recommend that the school purchases a few.
The Maker Movement
The other part of the class focused on the Maker Movement, which was a fairly natural progression out from building our own synth kits. The Maker Movement is a group of people who are dedicated to being creators, not just consumers. Adweek called them "the umbrella term for independent inventors, designers and tinkerers", and TIME argue that this movement could lead to the next technological leap forward, like the computer class hubs that led to the PC. It was explained to us in class that the Maker Movement is open source and is all about sharing knowledge, so that someone with a great idea but no plan could come and find someone who knows how to make things, and they could solve the problem or create something new together.
So what implications could the maker movement have for music education? Well, in the first half of the lecture we built synthesisers, and looked at the intersection between software (i.e. synths on computers) and hardware (i.e. using actual physical synthesisers). If you can build a synth, why not make your own instrument? Particularly in popular music, there are quite a narrow range of instruments that are used very commonly, and the maker movement could help to spark ingenuity in creating new sounds and new possibilities for musical exploration.
Who knows? Maybe someone from the maker movement will create something like this: