Up, not North

Nuit Blanche Chiptunes

October 2nd, 2011

Last night I had the pleasure of co-curating an all-night concert of Chiptunes music at the TIFF Bell Lightbox as part of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. (Clearly, I’m not too great at this whole “promotion” thing: note that this happened last night.) Nonetheless, it was an amazing event, and I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to participate. Thanks to all our amazing artists, TIFF staff, and volunteers!

My main role was in designing, manufacturing, and building small noisemakers to give out to the crowd. There were four different colour-coded notes, and during one performance the audience was prompted with coloured cards to play along.I was surprised and delighted by how popular the boards were; we gave out all 150 of them in a matter of minutes, and people were asking for them long after they were all gone. It seems there’s an untapped thirst for simple noisemakers; that might be something I have to follow up on in the future…

The circuit is just a simple 555 astable oscillator, with different resistors on each colour to create a different note. They were assembled in two marathon soldering sessions at Site 3, where I was joined by several student volunteers from Ryerson’s New Media. My eternal gratitude goes out to them! You can take a little peek behind-the-scenes in this video:

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