First Day:
It was an exciting first day in the Vermont FAB Lab course "Making Things." For me, as a 2 dimensional artist, the concept of drawing, planning and then building is often a confusing one, albeit a bit nerve-wracking, which is a major reason why I decided to enroll in this course. The use of electricity, sound, robots, eTextiles, these are all very foreign activities/materials to me. I need hands on experience!
Our first mini-project involved the creation and exploration of a variation of sounds through our own construction in partner groups. My partner and I quickly turned to eight-year olds as we tinkered with the speaker, the wires, adding objects from our bags and pockets right into the speaker itself to hear what delightful humming or clanging might be amplified. Our experiments, or sounds, included the following ten scenarios:
- placing a water bottle in the speaker
- placing can tabs in the speaker
- placing a set of keys in the speaker
- placing scrunched plastic into the speaker
- placing 5 quarters into the speaker, and then:
- 5 dimes
- 5 pennies
- placing a cloth UNDERNEATH objects in the speaker to "muffle"
- filling a can with water, hearing the water slosh
- placing foam balls in the speaker
- placing the speaker with most of the above into a cardboard box to amplify further
- placing objects in an aluminum tray and using the surface to create a variety of sounds
I've included images of my notes, (my apologies for the doodles, I am a serial doodler) that list our different experiments with materials and sounds:
My notes begin on the bottom right hand corner of this image..
....to be continued in this image:
The following images are of two of our favorite sound creations, with an aluminium tray and a tin can filled with water (in which we also added coins and other objects to):
