The art of music is as expressive an art as you can find, so why shouldn’t the objects we use to make music be equally personal and creative? That’s the question we ask regularly on CDM, so we’re pleased to be sponsoring a contest with our friends at Instructables, along with the good people of Bleep Labs and custom speaker maker Zalytron.
Instructables, of course, are a site that let you share step-by-step instructions for making stuff. Far from keeping you art secret, they let you claim bragging rights for brilliant creations by letting you share how you’ve made them — and how other folks can do the same. It says that making things doesn’t have to be about something you’ve got that no one else does, but on the contrary, that value can actually come from other people doing the same thing. I got to meet the co-founders on the panel we gave at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon – really terrific folks.
For the Art of Sound Contest, anything’s game – homemade and modded instruments, electronics, circuit bending, speakers, controllers, the lot – even visuals. At the risk of influencing the voting, there’s already a musical light show, on the visual end, a sequencer (seen at top), an Arduino trumpet, and, yes, Spock lovers, even a Vulcan Lyre.
By the way, if you document stuff on Instructables, you can now embed the steps, as seen below. So that means you can make your own page on our in-alpha-testing noisepages community site and add additional details in blog form.
Check out the latest and most popular entries on the contest page:
http://www.instructables.com/contest/artofsound
And, of course, even if you don’t enter, you’ll have lots of things to try making. If you do want to enter, you have until July 26. Stay tuned to CDM as we keep track of the contest and the projects – even if you can’t enter, I promise we’ll have some goodies to share. And, of course, there’s an instructables for how to enter:
How To Enter the Art of Sound Contest – More DIY How To Projects
I’m especially fond of these speaker creatures. Mustache? Monocle? Check. And, hey, even if you lose, there’s an Instructables to teach you to make your own.
Too cute…
Updated: It seems Instructables has gone to a new pricing model. I’m still getting all the details as this is a recent announcement. I realize this may be cause for concern for some of our readers. Suffice to say, I understand that bandwidth-consuming sites aren’t free to run as a publisher myself, but I also understand creators being concerned about specific restrictions – particularly in regards to content they’ve created. It does appear that the “free” accounts are functional; I’m just unclear, for instance, on the “secondary images” – what sizes you have access to, etc. Stay tuned.