Digital Boxes
Concept, Design, Construction & Programming: Heather Frasch (2018)
About: Digital Boxes is a versatile digital instrument constructed from cigar boxes. With microphones, sensors & objects hidden inside, the instrument serves as a vessel for hiding/revealing material during the pieces that it interprets.
Materials: Objects: string, wood, sticks, slates, pine cones, acorns, pencils
Electronics: Arduino, MAX, 2DPA microphones, transducers, Sensors (Infra-red, stretch e-textile, strip potentiometer, light)
Each box uses a different motion tracking system to pick up the motions of the performer and then process the live sounds including granulation, harmonizer and spatialization. It also controls a ring modulator and digital synthesizer.
Audio Example:
Weaving Broken Threads for digital cigar boxes, objects & thread
Composition for solo performer-composer (2019)
About: Weaving Broken Threads is a composition for Solo Performer-Composer which references the acousmatic listening practice of disembodied sound, but through a humanist re-embodied approach. The digital instrument uses old cigar boxes to hide performance activity, digital sensors and electronics. The presence of the cigar boxes imply a strong symbolic presence, a very human perspective connecting to the old, the hidden & the secretive.
The source material for this work is influenced by Bachelard’s notion of topology which uses the memory of “houses as a tool for analysis of the human soul.” In this version, I collected physical objects that remind me of places I’ve lived for more than 1 year. Then I set them into motion using vibrating surfaces, processing their sounds through max/msp. Only the strings of the dangling objects are revealed to the audience, hinting but not revealing to what is happening behind the scene. One of the boxes uses an infra-red and stretch sensor to create a synthesizer whose harmonies are programmed referencing the first piece I composed. The pieces ends with these harmonies being processed and manipulated by a ring modulator that is controlled by an electromagnetic piece of thread. The physical presence of ‘thread’ draws the two sections of the piece together as well as underscores the conceptual notion of ‘thread’ that this piece explores — the thread of memories and identity in connection with spaces.
