![]() The signal runs through a small metropolis of effects pedals that amplify and expand the resonances and sputterings of his mouth against the glass. Yeldham uses glass like a wind instrument, smooshing his face against the pane as he blows, hums, bites and otherwise imitates the world’s least subtle peeping Tom. ![]() My wife loves my hobby and never teases me about it.Įarlier this summer, I visited a different windowless room for a performance by one of the grandmasters of piezo-mic mayhem: Justice Yeldham, an Australian noise artist known for attaching contact mics to large pieces of broken glass. Indeed, my hobby has made trash nights newly enticing, as I wander the neighborhood looking for garbage that might sound interesting. People build noise boxes with combs, wires, silverware, rubber bands, fidget spinners, sandpaper, old saw blades - tiny orchestras of singing objects, monumentalized by the mics placed inside. When I shake the tin and turn the volume up, it sounds as if the springs and the Ping-Pong balls are role-playing the end of the world. ![]() I’ve built a few of these, including an old cookie tin I outfitted with various springs and filled with Ping-Pong balls. If what you want, however, is to drink some beers, plug in some pedals and freak out some friends by turning an old Garfield paperback into a wailing orgy of dissonance, you can be up and running for just a few dollars (excluding the cost of the beers).Ī common use of piezo mics among experimental musicians is in “noise boxes,” ungainly contraptions in which household objects are mounted around and amplified by piezo mics. You can spend hundreds of dollars on a high-quality contact mic specially designed for the subtle timbres of an orchestral string instrument if that’s what you want. My dumb guitar never led me to such insights.īest of all, piezo mics are cheap - probably one of the most affordable technologies for completely transforming your appreciation of our world. Rubbing a piezo mic against a felt cowboy hat sent me down a sound-dappled path of contemplation, musing on the subtleties of surface texture and how difficult it would be to play croquet on a felt cowboy hat if you were, say, 10 molecules tall. I taped one to the bottom of a water bottle on a hot afternoon and ran the signal through a reverb pedal the ice cubes banging around sounded like gongs from distant planets. They look unassuming, but once they’re plugged into an amplifier, piezo discs become psychedelic microscopes for your ears, completely changing your sense of sonic scale.
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