Armageddon through a slinky, Around the World in 2000 Pictures, and a can of beans.

Today's amusement required wiring up a small transformer to turn a contact mic into a contact speaker. It's a little doohickey you buy at Radio Shack and then use backwards for something it was never intended to do as explained in the previously mentioned book that tells you how to do all of this fun stuff.

The connections on this one were a little tricky since there wasn't very much room. Also, soldering jacks is a pain.


Once that was all done and stylishly taped up, time to add the slinky, the book, the beans, a little pager motor that will make the slinky vibrate, a couple of more contact microphones, the tiny amp, a broken karaoke boom box, and a disembodied tape head and some bits of tape stuck to a notebook. Today's selections: some guy's country tape I got at a thrift store and Michael Bay's video classic Armageddon.



































































So what did it sound like? Kind of like Thor's really shitty Walkman. Pretty cool.

Baby's first contact mic.

My usual amusements are mostly fall and winter kinds of things. So what do bored ladies do in the summertime? Electronics projects, of course. For a while, at least, I'm going to be documenting my attempts at making interesting noises based on the projects in Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking.

So today's project: making a contact microphone out of a piezo disk. Considering that my soldering is pretty crappy and I have the steady hands of a woman three times my age, this was a little tricky.

Basically you stick the disk on one end of a piece of shielded cable and a jack on the other so you can plug it into an amp. Then you tape the hell out of everything in an attempt to keep your shitty soldering from shorting out and dip it in plastic paint.

Here's everything all soldered together before the taping and paint part:
















Dipped in the plastic goo and hanging up to dry:





















Look sharp, ambient hums.