The hottest Friday night in Edinburgh, our monthly music event returned last week for more of the best in eccentric homebrew action. We saw Andrew Kieran’s fabric potentiometers – hand-woven cloths designed to behave as electronic components – being used to control sequencers and to drive synths.

Andrew was good enough to explain some of the technology behind his creation, though sadly my phone was not up to the job of videoing much. Tom Hardiment demoed his arc tweeter, a speaker that emits sound by modulating a high-voltage electrical arc.

Also, Ioann Maria brought a nostalgia trip in the form of an old Amiga 600 with Protracker in the disk drive. Naturally, after we’d worked out how to make it make noises we had to wire this to the arc tweeter. Tom Larkworthy wrote a whole set of strange and wonderful vocal modulations in SuperCollider.

A good time was had by all, the next one is on March 16th!

Andrew with his fabric sequencer.

This was a particularly formidable night, owing to the arrival of Stephen with his awesome home-made hurdy gurdy.

I also gave a bit of a talk about SuperCollider, and some hacklabbers got to try it out on their laptops. We got Ioann’s old Yamaha keyboard working and played with pugs.

The next music night will be on the 17th of February. Is there something you’d like to hack next month? Join us on our mailing list and come along on the night!