Randomatones

Some in-house volunteer help setting up my next Randomatones installation in the Electric Room of the London Museum of Water & Steam at Kew Bridge. I'm happy to say Richard Albanese (pictured right) allowed me to go up the ladder myself. This was useful. Without knowing exact positions until I got there, I was not able to prepare much cabling beforehand, meaning everything had to be cut and connected on site, some of it 4m off the ground.

With an installation coming up at the London Museum of Water & Steam soon, I want a new driver unit, so that I can keep the Turbine Room box spare in case I have the opportunity of doing another installation there, or a similar one elsewhere. I have had this motherboard at home for a very long time. For a while I used it as the controller for an experimental electronic drum setup. It's a 2005 Fujitsu Siemens W26361-W1372-X-03. I have no idea what any of that means. It has two CPU cores and 2GB ram installed, though I could increase that if I wanted. I don't. This motherboard is easily powerful enough for the job it will soon have. A little too old to have an HDMI port, it does have four USB ports, plus connections onboard for four more if I need them. It has two PCI sockets, and I have tried plugging in a couple of different soundcards to these, but it tends to forget they are connected, and I cannot be bothered to delve into the finer workings of Ubuntu Server to make them re-appear. So I have been experimenting with a composite soundcard setup, where I can make several distinct USB stereo audio devices appear as a single multi-channel device. So far this has worked up to 8 channels. I'm not sure whether the issue beyond 8 channels isn't my player. No matter, for the Water & Steam installation I only want 6, for use with my purpose-built 6-channel amplifier.

For the last two hanging loudspeaker installations I have used a laptop, or the innards of one, with its HDMI output connected to an 8-channel DAC. I then have an 8-channel audio amplifier to drive the loudspeakers. This works well (although not on a Raspberry Pi, I have found), but needs me to spend £60 on the HDMI DAC. The not-so-broken laptop I bought off ebay for the last installation cost me £10. I like to take any opportunity I can to upcycle old equipent. This USB audio converter is from a broken pair of Microsoft Lifechat headphones. As I discovered, the USB lead into this converter unit had disintegrated, and connection was intermittent at best. So I took off the old cables and soldered in some new ones, and of course it works fine. This is the kind of photo I need to check my USB wiring is correct. The red and black are the 5V and ground lines. The green and white leads are the data pair.

This is the Electric Room in the London Museum of Water & Steam (LMWS) at Kew Bridge. When he was little, my son and I were regular visitors to this museum. I approached them last year proposing a Randomatones installation. My timing was off, as they were already installing an exhibition by their artist-in-residence Jasmine Pradissitto. I made a short video at the time, but postponed any further plans. This year the panets are better aligned, and in the room pictured, I will soon be installing a hanging Randomatones setup similar to my Turbine Room installation last yeat in the Walthamstow Wetlands Engine House. This will be the first of two LMWS installations this year. The second will be a floating installation in the pool where I made my video last year.

Exactly a year ago I set up an 8-speaker hanging Randomatones installation in the Turbine Room at the Walthamstow Wetlands Engine House. The Randomatones will be back in the Turbine Room at the end of the month, this time over both weekend days. The format will be similar to last year, except the speaker supports will include small motors to provide rotation. I tried out a prototype rotation mechanism a couple of weeks ago at Heart Of Noise Cambridge #14. The sounds will be similar to last year, but from completely new software.

This is the control box I took to the Walthamstow Wetlands Engine House for the Randomatones installation last February. It oiginally had a Raspberry Pi driving the sounds, but that was unreliable, so on the day I just ran everything from my laptop. Soon afterwards I bought a very cheap machine from ebay, so cheap it was less than the Raspberry Pi, and got that working. Finally I have added a sunken shelf to control box on which to put the motherboard. A slight pity is the screen has to be positioned a little off-centre, because the connector lead to the motherboard is too short. I can live with it. On the screen, in case you're curious, is me looking up a script I half finished to run the machine as a Wifi hub.

The third of three videos I made on Sunday 16 Nov 2025, and the second to feature this new Explorer, as I call it. Here it floats into a hidden world above the M25, north of London. It's an aqueduct approx 100m long, with a very low covering, making it utterly inhospitable to this particular sound artist, and, I suspect, almost anyone else. But I am happy to send my instruments into it, to capture video, and play/record some sounds in there. This was the result, making its way along the length of the watercourse in real time.

I gave a short talk on the Randomatones at Heart Of Noise Cambridge #14. As well as showing the usual red and blue standing units, I demonstrated a new prototype hanging setup where the speakers rotate on their support cables.

A prototype arrangement that takes last year's Walthamstow Engine House installation up a step, with a motor at the top of each suspension wire to rotate the hanging speaker when a sound plays. This is unlike the normal rotation of the standing or floating units I have built so far, which is random. Here, the idea is that the rotation helps to indicate that a sound is playing from the speaker. There are already LEDs to do that (green for off, blue for quiet sound, red for loud sound), but I want something to make the installation more interesting to look at, especially as people (not least me) like to video. Rotating the speaker also makes the sound more interesting in a drier acoustic environment.

Building this prototype, I discovered couple of problems with the idea. At first, I had the motor down at the speaker end. This was so that I could put electronics on the speaker unit that would trigger rotation from the LED setup I already had. I got all the electronics working, but the motor didn't have enough power to turn the speaker. For no reason I can remember, I tried putting the motor at the top, and hanging the cable instead from it. It rotated fine. Vague memories of physics tell me this is to do with angular momentum. At the speaker end there is a lot, because it is somewhat heavy and bulky. Where the cable is attached, except for some inherent elasticity between it and the speaker end, which acts only within the very slim cable, there is almost none.

Another issue is that having been careful to get the rotation starting and stopping at the beginning and end of playing a sample, only a very light speaker will move that responsively. The horn speaker here is well over a kilogram, meaning the cable twists before the speaker starts turning. With this lag before the heavy horn speaker eventually moves, the rotation happens out of sync with the sound being played. It may as well have been random.

In a week I will test this setup live at Heart Of Noise Cambridge, and I'll see how it looks, then decide what to do about controlling the rotation. In this prototype I am driving movement from the Raspberry Pi, meaning I have some control over when it happens and for how long. In the Engine House I'll be using a different computer with none of the GPIO ports a Raspberry Pi has. Random movement is not that easy with ancient electronics.