Remember when LEGO toys used to be our canvas to create absolutely anything? From articles, accessories to large-scale models, LEGO made the opportunity for creativity limitless. Much like music. Meet Alex Allmont. Alex is a PhD in improvisation with polyrhythm and phased rhythms, whose developing modular synths, performance pieces, musical machines and installation work. Converging on a sort of Reich/jazz/tech fusion, he finds unique ways to mash up sounds to create complex rhythms. His latest venture was a LEGO ensemble cleverly called ‘Play House‘, which is an automata that generates slow hypnotic acid house through mechanisms built from LEGO Technic. Made for AudioGraft 2014 with a commission from Oxford Contemporary Music, Alex’s LEGO-Music-making ventures blur the lines of geek with downright awesome! Check out the video below to hear a perfectly good acid house breakdown!
While he had been experimenting with synthesizers and curating different sounds using various effects, his love for LEGO had him experimenting with rhythm, including developing a number of LEGO musical machines. His proposal to develop Play House, an automaton that would churn out mesmerising acid house was the result of his inspiration for artists like Plastikman and Basic Channel.
Play House is an automata that mechanically computes and performs hooky and hypnotic acid house. Like a generative musical loom, a single drive turns a sequence of LEGO gears, levers and latches that mutate riffs and rhythm patterns. These are played out on analogue drums and synthesisers from the halcyon days of 1980?s dance music while the machine gradually shifts the timbre and space of the sound.
Now, while majority of his research is very simply, over our heads, his explanation as to how the LEGO arrangement actually curates the music is fascinating! Through a series of complex arrangements and inter-relationships between synthesizers, modulators and transducers, Alex was able to successfully create a music making machine!
To keep the melody and drums in sync I needed a main sequencer that handled the count of each note. A traditional electronic sequencer often splits up a bar into 16 notes with 4 beats in a bar, i.e., 4/4 time with quarter notes. In this piece I decided instead to use 2/4 with quarter notes, partly because going from 16 to 8 saves a lot of space and complexity, but also because it would generate a melody that repeats on every other beat, and I found this ideal for the hypnotic music I was producing. The construction is very simple because Lego has a 16-tooth gear, so to make an 8-step sequencer you need a central shaft with 8 of these gears on it and from each gear you drive another 16 tooth gear, each being rotated two teeth on from the last. Each driven gear is 1/8th out of phase with the last, and if you put little tappers under each gear and you have a sequencer that taps out 1/8th notes.
Innovative approaches such as these are always an inspiration for music producers as well as LEGO enthusiasts! To learn more about Playhouse and Alex’s philosophy, click here and too see more videos of the Playhouse project, click here.
Reblogged this on Hamed Khalidi Blogging.