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Showing posts from February, 2020

Crafting Sound Lab Team

We are excited to share the Spring 2020 team members of the Crafting Sound Lab! Dr. Abby Aresty is a sound artist, composer, and educator. Her community-based creative practice empowers individuals to work creatively with sound, and to share their stories while building community through collective making, integrated learning, and storytelling. Aresty’s site-specific installations have been featured in local and national news outlets; Paths II: The Music of Trees, a temporary installation in Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum, was featured in an interview with Melissa Block on NPR’s All Things Considered and was hailed as “otherworldly” and “sometimes eerie, sometimes transportingly lovely,” by the Seattle Times. Aresty has presented her research in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong, in conferences including ICMC, Balance/Unbalance, ISEA, and Sonic Environments. She has held fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Grin...

Hello! Welcome! We are making WINDCHIMES!

Tonight the Crafting Sound Lab bustled with experimental thinking and making! Together, Maya, Rachel and Kat explored new materials, and designs for the Better Breather's club Electronic Wind Chime. The device seeks to support individuals with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or those who would simply like to observe their breathing: Recap During our first meeting, we had a lot of fun noodling around with electronics and materials. Rachel and Gabe made headway on a simple circuit to power the chime. Maya and I discovered that the most prominent and interest sounds came from a combination of surface transducers, contact mics and Abby's favorite DIY paper, made from  Abaca fiber . We combined the materials with Rachel's amp. Rough Chimes! Together we hoped to make three wind chime prototypes with varying appearance and makeup. We ran into some trouble when the circuit from last week made less sound and eventually made no sounds at all. Rachel figured...
Welcome to the Crafting Sound Lab blog!  Led by Technical Director Abby Aresty, we are an undergraduate research lab at Oberlin College and Conservatory located within the TIMARA department exploring the intersection of handmade electronics, traditional crafts, and code.  Our projects explore topics including electronic music pedagogy, outreach, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math education), sound art, and sound art installations. During Spring semester 2020, we are working on four projects, described below. Sonic Arts in Society and the Girls Electronic Arts Retreat each incorporate several different types of creative projects and will have some overlap, whereas Of Earth and Sun and The ArtiFACT Project are independent projects.  Sonic Arts in Society Sonic Arts in Society is a community-based learning course that brings innovative music technology workshops and programming—with an emphasis on interdisciplinary Science, Technology, Engineerin...