The Octopus Instrument
This was my proposed thesis we had to let go of at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s an instrument for a large amount of people to make simple electronic sounds together across a visual synthesizer. I built most of it, but it was damaged in a move and this is the only record we have of it
It used, like all of my instruments of this period, a antiquated OS using Max/MSP sound synthesis patches that we’ve had as open source on github for a number of years. It was four channel audio. You can find them in the Code section of this website. Years later it wouldn’t actually take much to build. It was innovative for it’s time, but in the hyper connected age we live in, it’s essentially an antique
we developed a working prototype at the end of a long period of study at CCA, performing with it at Day of Noise at Stanford. Several of the recordings on our Soundcloud were made with versions of this system. Each of these would have been like nodes placed around the center response unit.
These were the Royal Dragons, which have been fully built. It was forward thinking for it’s time. It was a combination of analog controls over arduino and a touchscreen, state of the art of it’s kind. During the school year at that time we didn’t have much funding so instead of laptops we built these to perform live with.