Last night, Machine Project hosted a contact microphone workshop followed by an art installation entitled Amplified Party. The evening was lead by sound artists John P. Hastings and Casey Anderson.
Using simple piezo disks, workshop attendees soldered simple contact microphones. If you Google “making a contact microphone” you might find the resulting tutorials to be intimidating. But it’s really simple, especially if you buy bare piezos instead of trying to extract them from buzzer assemblies.
The most challenging part is soldering to the piezo disk itself. They can be finicky and are somewhat easy to damage. But they’re inexpensive, especially when purchased in quantity, so ruining a piezo or two is no big deal.
Here’s one of the mics I made at the workshop. It’s built with a three-contact piezo, and covered in hot glue to reinforce the cable connection to the disk, and also to protect the crystal disk a bit (the green area).
After the workshop, Hastings and Anderson set up a table of party food (tamales, chips, baby carrots, grapes, peanuts, M&Ms, and a bucket of sodas and beers), and invited attendees to attach their new contact mics to the table and bowls of food. The output of the microphones was played through four speakers, creating a fascinating cacophony of swishing, swirling, and crunching as the partygoers served themselves.
There is a wide variety of things you can do with a contact microphone. They can be used as pickups to electrify acoustic instruments. Anything you attach a contact mic to becomes an instrument, including unusual items like feathers or candlesticks. And they let you record things you couldn’t otherwise hear, such as beetles eating tree bark.
One of my favorite examples is Ranjit Bhatnagar’s Instrument A Day number 21 from this year – he strapped contact mics to flashing Christmas tree lights. They make a very pretty percussion sound, like a tiny Gamelan.
I’ve had a contact mic for several years, though I haven’t used it much. I attended the workshop so that I could get some more ideas of how to use them. One of my mics was used on a bowl of M&Ms. Placement proved to be important – the sound was muffled from the side, but much louder on the rim.
The best sound at the Amplified Party was on the galvanized tub holding the drinks. The tub resonated quite well, which is what you want for a contact mic. Reaching into the ice and pulling out a can of soda created a fantastic crazy world of crunching and rushing sounds, much richer an fuller than it sounds to the human ear during a summer BBQ.
Here’s something I recorded with a contact microphone a few years ago. It was attached to an electric kettle, into which water is poured and then brought to a boil. In some ways, it sounds exactly like that, but in some ways sounds unearthly.
Music to me is a way of presenting the sounds of the world in a way that the listener doesn’t normally hear them. Sometimes these sounds are discrete notes produced by an instrument. Sometimes these sounds are that of boiling water. Or even completely synthesized. I realize this isn’t everyone’s defenition of music, but the contact mic is a great tool for capturing those sounds in the most interesting way possible.
