Embedded - 491: Oscillators Oscillating Other Oscillators

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Chris and Elecia spoke with Kirk Pearson about running audio-electronic-art workshops, interesting sounds, and their book Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos.  Find the book and a whole kit of parts on the Dogbotic Merch page. A few clicks from there you can find the Workshop List (don’t forget the coupon in the show audio).  We also mentioned The Thing (a sneaky listening device), Elliot Williams’ writing on CMOS synthesizers (a series called Logic-Noise) and the videos of Sebastian Tomczak (YouTube: littlescalemusic). Transcript   Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.

Hello, and welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. Our guest this week is Kirk Pearson, and we're going to talk about music, electronics, teaching, composing, dogs, robots, and, well, anything else we feel like talking about. Hi, Kirk. It's good to talk to you. Hi. Thank you for having me. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at an author book signing? Hmm. Well, I'm a composer and a lot of the work that I do under, you know,

the studio Dogbotic is I write, you know, eccentric music for eccentric people. Sometimes it's for film or TV. Sometimes it's for installation or radio or strange little art projects. And a lot of the work I do is building my own musical instruments. That's just, you know, always what's kind of attracted me to experimental music. And since the pandemic, we've been actually teaching virtual workshops on how to build your own musical instruments. So we started off with one where I shipped people a box and I taught you how to build a synthesizer over a couple months. And it's kind of exploded into a whole bunch of offerings and oft-maligned creative topics, as we put it.

Things that we weren't taught in art school, but we really wish we were. And so, yeah, recently we just wrote a book called Electronic Music from Scratch, which is, it's really intended for beginners, but for people who, you know, have a creative urge to them, but, you know, no, necessarily they don't have any circuitry experience. This is a book that, you know, it's a nice, simple introduction to a lot of sounds that are surprisingly complicated that you can make at home. And Christopher has that book currently in his hands, and we have many questions about it. Visually, he just did the Vanna White thing. Oh, great.

But before we do that, we want to do a lightning round. Are you ready? Okay. I am ready. What's your favorite audio sound effect in a movie either that you did or somebody else did? Oh, my favorite audio sound effect. So one of my favorite sound effects is the thing that I kind of hide in everything I do. It's me making the mouth bubble sound.

Wow. Yeah, I know. You can't see me, so you have no idea how I made that. No, that's just one of my personal favorites. It's a sound I could do since childhood, and you can tell when I've sound designed something because you hear that somewhere in there. But I mean, I don't know. There's so many classic in-jokes in sound design, especially. One of the most famous ones, which you might have heard of, is the Wilhelm scream. Yes. Which was a ridiculous

sound effect made in the 1960s that then kind of became an in-joke. It's a completely ridiculous scream. It sounds nothing like a real person screaming. But it's a great thing to just hide around. I have a whole bunch of screams that I've recorded for a variety of

different projects, and they're always fun to sneak around in the background. Making music, engineering, composing, writing, or teaching? Oh, I mean, all of the above. I think it's kind of, I don't know, being a musician is an exciting thing because you're not necessarily doing the same thing every day. There are many different aspects to my creative practice that all kind of feed into one another. I love teaching. I really do. I think it brings me a lot emotionally to get people to make things that they themselves are surprised that they made. But also, teaching is a great way to ground your understanding. The best way to learn something is to teach it, I think.

And, I mean, I feel very fortunate in my job that, you know, I get so many different interesting people in our workshops that I constantly have my own assumptions challenged. And, you know, I constantly have new ideas brought up to me. Favorite electronic component? Favorite electronic component? I don't think any of these were on the doc. My favorite electronic component is, I'll say, a photo transistor. That's a fun one. If you take a photo transistor and you hook it right up to an amplifier, you can take your TV remote or anything that uses infrared and shine it at the photo transistor, and you can get it to make all sorts of goofy sounds so i'm a big fan of that dogs are robots dogs are robots uh por que no

los dos uh yeah i don't know there's been a there's been a strong uh a strong cultural canon of robot dogs you know that i that i feel like, I can get along with. I'll go with K9 from Doctor Who. Oh yeah. What is the favorite project that you have done sound composition for? Oh, geez. There are so many. I guess one of, one of the ones that comes up a lot is, I did the sound design for Rihanna's Savage X Fenty show when that happened last.

And it was really kind of an amazing carte blanche process in that I had these little animated interstitial segments that they had me working with. But I just got to build some crazy electronics for it. So most of the sounds that you hear in the fashion show are literally synthesizers that I prototyped myself, recorded, and then edited around. I think we've been very fortunate, probably because we have such a goofy business name and that the projects we tend to get tend to be kind of, you know, outside the box, you know. So that's fun for me. I always appreciate a project when, you know, it enables me to try a different recipe, so to speak, for making sound. What is your favorite 10-week workshop to teach? Oh, okay. So currently my favorite is, it's one that we call a sound forager's guide to

the virtual studio. It's really hard to pitch. It's effectively learning how to make music on your computer, but not in the way you anticipated. So you learn a whole bunch of musical processes that you wouldn't think are musical. For instance, we build an echo effect in a spreadsheet. We do a whole day where we convert sounds into images, Photoshop the images and convert them back into sounds. And you can learn how you can accomplish a lot of audio processes visually. So I really like teaching, you know, kind of, it gets really nitty gritty of this is actually what your computer is doing when it does, you know, a digital signal processing thing. But it's done so in a way that, you know, is, it's pretty intuitive for people to figure out and actually, you know, gets them to wrap their head around.

Like, for instance, it's much easier to think about a denoising process visually than it is sonically. So I really appreciate that. But yeah, we have our final class next week. All of the students have written their own little found sound composition. We're going to take a listen. We're going to release it on a CD. It's a ton of fun to teach. We continuously get really cool people.

I don't know how we're so lucky, but it's great for me. Favorite fictional robot? I have three for you. I thought long and hard about this, Christopher. My three are, you know, because I didn't want to say R2-D2. It's too obvious.

So my three are, one is the Techno Trousers from Wallace and gromit which certainly is a robot uh you know it can participate in a jewel heist it's uh it's very multi-purpose uh my my second is a mecha godzilla uh mecha godzilla you see is uh is additionally scary because he's not just a large lizard he's also a robot you know i don't know why that was an additional thing they had to throw at you, but somehow it was. I also really appreciate how

as the Tokyo skyline gets taller, they have to size Godzilla up at every movie just so he's tall enough that you can see over the skyline. I've been showing my lizard the Godzilla movies for inspo lately, so it's been on my mind. Dangerous.

And the third is the Fembots from Austin Powers who were responsible for Great Awakenings from myself as a 10-year-old. But also, just a good robot. And do you have a tip everyone should know?

A tip everyone should know? This is one that I learned from the music world, but I actually think extends really well into any world you might be working in. If you're improvising and you make a mistake, make that mistake more than once. That's jazz. Yeah, lean into it.

If you do something by accident, just make it not an accident. It is very possible to do. Yeah, lean into it. If you do something by accident, just make it not an accident. Like, you know, it is very possible to do. Thank you to Memfault for sponsoring this show. We appreciate their sponsorship and the work that they do. Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products faster. What that means is that if you have just realized that you're going to build

5, 10, 100, 50,000 units and you need to keep track of them, they'll let you create your own dashboard to observe how your system is doing in the field. Memfault gives developers a more scalable and sustainable process. This accelerates the time to market and de-risks product launches. You can cut product costs and deliver more high-quality software. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and across mission-critical systems, such as access control, point-of-sale, energy, and healthcare. Thanks again to Memfault for sponsoring this show. Check out memfault.com and the Interrupt blog, which is filled with incredible amounts of information. Christopher, what page are you on on the book? I am on page 124. Of Make,

Electronic Music from Scratch, A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos. Kirk, I believe that's your book? Indeed it is. Could you tell us about it? Yeah, so Electronic Music from Scratch is kind of the result of me teaching these workshops for many years. It's a book on how to build your own electronic music instruments at home. If you've ever wanted to build your own synthesizer, drum machine, talk box, or whatever, this is the book for you, or at least

that's what I'm supposed to say. Truthfully, there are a lot of great musical circuitry books out there, and I really try to ground the workshops in this a lot. I am a composer. I'm not an engineer. I know my stuff from doing, it's from the angle of someone wanting to make sound more so than anything else. So really, the goal of it is, you know, to get you to make a working thing as quickly as humanly possible. I just flipped forward to page 124 because you brought it up and I was curious what was on there. But that's actually it's a great project. It's a it's the electro cricket.

It's a really kind of like straightforward project. But the idea is you make a little circuit that sounds shockingly like a cricket. And the way it works is really kind of beautifully simple. So you have a square wave oscillator that you build on a little, you know, NAND gate that you've wired up to self-oscillate. So it makes a beeping sound. And it's really easy to have a second square wave modulate the first square wave, turning it on and off. So it makes something that sounds like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, like a smoke detector or whatever. And what this project is, is once you attach a third square wave to the second, you can make something go...

Right? And it's just putting one oscillator on another oscillator on another. And that's really all a synthesizer is. It's simple function generators turning on and off other function generators, but they're doing it so quickly that you perceive what they're doing as something that's incredibly complicated. But really, it's not. I expected when I got your book that it would be a series of projects.

Which it is. Which it is. Which it is. I mean, but usually the projects are more put this together with that and we'll say the timer does this, but it would be a one-line description. You ended up putting a lot of electronics in your book. Yeah. I think that I probably say to the point where it's kind of cliche in the workshops, but I really try to encourage people to think about the electronic components like paints in a paint box. And you'll start to realize that like, oh, yeah, when you swap out where like at the end of the day, you will be making this project and that's what you will walk away with. To me, it was much more fun to, you know, learn the technique and then to see people put things together in a way that I didn't anticipate they would.

So kind of a lovely thing about the workshops is everyone's final project ends up being entirely different because it's a whole bunch of different circuits that all talk to each other. And we really tried to make the book similar. So you can kind of take the portions of the circuits that you like the most, combine them into something that you are the only person in the world that owns. You can really make something that is very specific to your needs. Like everything in the design world, right, comes with some sort of pre-established technological code, you know, like when you buy a synthesizer from a store or something, it's effectively the Roland Corporation telling you, these are the settings that we think you should have access to, to make a thing that we think is musical, right? And, you know, that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's important to remember that the design, you know, codes of the world don't necessarily fit the user's needs, you know.

And especially in a world where, you know, things are harder and harder to fix, it becomes like really kind of a radical act to build something yourself that's not, you know, strictly off of a data sheet or something like that. So it's, you know, I think it's cool to remember that, you know, the big companies that produce electronic music products, you know, they're not the arbiters of new sounds. You have that power too. And it's not nearly as difficult as I was led to believe it was growing up. One thing that I kind of just realized today looking through this is we come from a professional background of electronics and software. And so there's mistakes that can be made. Yeah, of course. Things can go wrong. And it's bad. It's bad when mistakes are made. And I've always tried to learn electronics from the standpoint of, you know... The right way. The academic right way.

And the cool thing about this stuff and audio things is the actual goal is to plug stuff together and see what happens. I mean, you have some basics, but you really encourage experimentation and you're not going to break anything or light anything on fire with any of these things. Or if you do break something, it's a $2 IC or something, right?

Exactly, yeah. So I think it's a really great way to approach electronics too because that fear of breaking something or not learning it the right way i think is really it's inhibiting to me i still don't know electronics very well so i'm looking i'm looking at this book and going i'm gonna go through this book because this is awesome um but you you kind of you kind of took the words out of my mouth honestly like it's it is so cool that with musical circuitry at the end of the day all you're doing is you're building a thing that sounds culturally interesting right like you're not building an electric car braking system right because if you had to do that it better work every dang time

right here in this case you know yeah like if someone comes up with a circuit and they're not sure why it makes the sound it does but they like like the sound it makes, I say, good for you. You win. You did it. and processes do beyond the mathematical, here's how resistors go together in parallel and serial, and here's how capacitors, which I know that. I've read it a whole bunch of times. But the gap between that and application is... And being able to say, okay, what I want to have happen is this. Right. I don't want to go back to the math at that point.

I want to just reach for the parts I want to reach for. And this seems a way to build intuition as well as creating some pretty fun stuff. Do you have a favorite project? There are a lot of really cool ones in the book. There's a whole chapter that's about rhythm machines. So this actually is kind of a fun thing to talk about. So when a lot of people think about drum machines, they kind of think about like a playback system that's playing MP3 files or something like that. But a thing that I've noticed a lot of people don't know is that the original drum machines, like up through the early 1980s,

they weren't sample-based at all, right? Like there was, you know, the ability to read and write digital files was so incredibly limited. So a way that all the early drum machines work is it's an analog circuit that when you give it a thump of current, the circuit will vibrate in a way that sounds kind of like a drum. So the way that the TR-808 and the CR-78 and all of those classic drum machines that everyone knows when you hear them,

the kick drum is actually just a really really resonant filter that is almost feeding back almost feeding back right and when you give it a a big uh thump and impulse of current it feeds back and it goes boom and that's that the way that you make a cymbal sound it's an x or gate You send a bunch of square waves into an XOR gate, and that produces an inharmonic sound. And I'm looking at this section now, and just to give people an idea of the comprehensive nature of the book, not only do you go through making all of the parts for those sound generators, but you've got a complete guide to several important rhythms in here, including the Bo Diddley beat and,

you know, some things from Africa and the Caribbean. So you can actually, you know, if you want to, program these beats into your thing you've made. I think, like, all the early drum machines come with, because you couldn't, they didn't really come with sequencers. Like, you couldn't program your own beat in there. But they would come with things like bossa nova and western or whatever. So cobbling together a lot of those rhythmic patterns I thought was really fun. And another thing that didn't strike me how cool it was until I actually did the research of it is how many simple rhythmic patterns turn into completely different rhythmic patterns if you

just change where you start or something like that. So like when you read a lot of those rhythmic patterns kind of laid out in that simple block notation, you start to realize, oh, this mass of people who had this rhythmic pattern moved over here, and then the stress started being put here. And then that led to, you know, it opened the floodgates for a completely different kind of culture. So I think it's just so, you know, it's a nice reminder at how, you know, kind of plastic and malleable culture is. So the workshops, are you going to keep teaching them now that you've written a book that, you know, has everything you wanted to say in it? That's a good question. Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think the book was nice in that it's a good means for us to, you know, to reach a different

audience and also like, you know, I think the thrill of taking a virtual workshop has subsided a little bit since COVID. But the format I really love. I don't think it would be possible for us to get 10 people from the Bay Area to show up in person every week. But with a virtual workshop, you have people from South America, West Africa, France, you know, just taking a workshop in real time with all with everybody else. And that's really cool. Like, you know, we wouldn't have been able to do that otherwise. The good news is, it seems like we're kind of headed the direction of we started out as a strictly an audio studio, and we're slowly moving into the direction of new media free for all. So we have all these workshops now on like,

there's one about, you know, wearable electronics where you build a musical suit. There's one all about called Filmcraft, which is also one of my favorites. That's all about experimental film processing techniques. So we literally ship you a whole bunch of film and you soak some in bleach, you bury some in the dirt, and then you send it all back to us. We scan it and then you edit a music video. So just stuff like that, you know, the kinds of stuff that I really wish I did get in art school, but for one reason or another, I didn't because the topic wasn't taken seriously. The workshops, they seem to be mostly two hours a week for 10 weeks, and I assume there's homework. Yeah.

I mean, I try not to rule it with an iron fist. I think with a lot of electronics, you gain intuition by building something and rebuilding it, rebuilding it. So I encourage people to do that. And I do have assignments for every week. But I really try to change the class based on what the interests of the people in the class are. So that's also kind of a nice thing about doing it live and not as a fixed YouTube series. And you said 10 people? Is that the normal class size? Yeah. Yeah, I'd say it's about 10. I think the absolute max that we do in a class is 15. But that's rare. We really try not to do that. We really do find the value of the class is it's nice to have someone there that you can ask questions to. And also, as I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast knows, if you've ever tried to learn something technical on the web, it's not great. And yet it's better than just having the art of electronics. Sure. No, that's fair.

But I've also found the art of electronics doesn't shame you when you don't know something. Just going through even Reddit forums where you're asking very understandable questions like how would you be expected to know the answer to that if you haven't been doing this for 10 years? And then people respond really obnoxiously. So there's just so much gatekeeping in technical fields. And that stresses me out. And it shouldn't be that way. So in some way, we kind of hope to be an antidote to that, where we really do try to foster a community know, supportive, but also one that doesn't tell you what kind of music to make. Like, really, I want you to make the music you've always wanted to make. I'm sorry, Elise is laughing because I just discovered the flipbook

at the top corner. Yeah, people don't notice that. He's so excited. And so I'm going through that over and over and over again. What you were saying was really interesting, but there was some discovery in it. There is a flipbook hidden in the textbook. What other Easter eggs? If that incentivizes you to buy a copy. You certainly didn't get that from the electronic version I had initially.

Oh yeah, that's the problem with the PDF. You have to press the down arrow really fast. I want to get back to the workshop because I have way more questions about it. But who did the illustrations for your book? Oh, Maisie Byerly, who I love dearly. Maisie and I went to school together, interestingly enough, and we lived in a co-op together. And we never really talked. Years after school.

She always did illustrations for the campus, satire publication and stuff like that. I always loved her sense of humor. So yeah, I sent her an email a couple years into Dogbotic when we started doing this workshop, and she was incredibly excited about it. And her art's just great. I really love her art. And I also really love how it's not

technical. It's really genuinely very approachable. Yes, that was the word. It's very approachable. And I mean, this is probably stuff that I've already kind of hinted at, but I dislike that the engineering world is so gatekeepy and stuff like that. And I found the easiest way to get people over their fear of looking at a transistor was to give it a face. So Maisie came up with all of those. The downside is it has a lot of people think that we're a company for kids, which we're really not.

But I think an adult can appreciate a good colorful illustration. Well, actually, when it said music from Scratch, I thought it was going to be the Scratch programming language. Oh, gosh, I didn't even think of that. That took me a second. But it's more electronics. That'd be music with Scratch. I guess so, yeah, yeah. I remember Scratch.

It's still really popular. Yeah. Okay, so the workshops. How do people find out about them? I mean, other than here right now? Yeah, right here right now with our expensive marketing strategy. Yeah, we actually have very little in the way of marketing strategy. It's been pretty much exclusively word of mouth um and yeah i don't know i think we uh the people that take the workshops uh they they tend to either come from a technical background or a completely non-technical background like a very creative

background we for some reason have a ton of puppeteers that take our workshops i i don't know why but i'm elated that that's the case um Like, I think, yeah, to me, it's exciting to me to, you know, to explain technical things as a means to doing something creative. So I love it that people end up coming up with projects that are things I would never think of, you know, because they're just approaching it from a completely different world than how I approach it. And that's, you know, that's the dream. I don't even know if that answered your question. It was a good answer. Whatever the question was,

which I don't remember. So you're great. And I like what you said, because when I taught a class, I liked having so much freedom with the final projects because people came up with things that I never could have imagined. I gave loose rules, but then they went off and did whatever they want,

which often didn't even follow the rules, which was fine. And you were teaching embedded systems? Yes. And it was more, it was intended to be paid for by the companies. It was intended to be a professional development sort of course,

and not an art-based course. But some people did quite a lot of art, because that is a good way to keep yourself engaged. Yeah, there were a lot of music projects, I remember, right? Yeah, and some tessellations and patterns and some interesting display things, lights. Yeah, I think kind of a part of pride for our particular workshops is that they all sound pretty frivolous on their surface. You know, like, you know, you really do learn creative engineering to like a surprisingly extensive curriculum.

But like, yeah, at the end of the day, you're making a silly little thing that makes sound, you know. So I guess it kind of weeds out a particular kind of person to take the workshop. But you kind of have to have a sense of humor to do it. Intentionally or not, I'm happy at how it shook out. I saw the textiles one and it did look really interesting because it was textiles with electronics. Although I don't think that was one you're teaching. No, I don't teach it, but this wonderful artist from Michigan,

Lynn Maitronk, teaches it. It's a cool curriculum. Like, the first project you do is you make a glove, and when you touch each independent finger to your thumb, it turns on a different LED. So, like, that's where you start out with, and then it very quickly works its way into building some surprisingly complicated musical and visual stuff. That's one of the few workshops we do that's actually microcontroller-based.

Everything I teach is completely just analog parts. And you ship out kits. Yeah. Doesn't that get expensive if you have international students? Yeah. It does. yeah isn't that kit expensive if you have international students yeah it does so yeah all the workshops we do yeah they all come with a kit that's you know whimsically illustrated and comes with

stuff you wouldn't expect in it you know so like the synthesizers kit comes with a rubber duck for emotional support and you know stuff like that but yeah we pack them all ourselves we ship them all ourselves. We ship them all ourselves. We've done so for literally thousands and thousands of boxes.

But yeah, it's kind of I guess, it's kind of like, yeah, part of the brand, I guess. It is hard for a lot of people to find the parts themselves when you're new to something. And we understand that. So we just bake the parts into the price of the workshop themselves.

Because it would be weird otherwise if you sign up for a thing and then we're like, okay, go get these 20 chips. Yeah, here's the DigiKey list. Sorry if you don't have DigiKey locally. Yeah, exactly. Right. Something like that. We've had people in Papua New Guinea

take the work. I believe that was the hardest one to ship to. But, yeah, it's interesting. It is also, like, on the flip side, I've also found it interesting how a lot of these parts are harder to get in the United States than there are in a lot of other places. Like, through whole components themselves. You have to kind of get them through a digital supplier. And so we've found our suppliers. But I do wonder if someday in the not too distant future, it'll be kind of workshoppy educational outfits kind of like us that are kind of keeping the through-hole industry around because they're not really used.

They're surprisingly hard to find. That's kind of scary. Yeah, I know, right? So everything will be a part that a machine is meant to work with, not a human. How do you set the price for your workshop? Complicated spreadsheets. I mean, you know, we try to figure out, obviously, how much the parts cost and stuff like that, and that changes all the time. We are currently sweating bullets about China tariffs coming up and seeing what will happen there. But really, dogmatic is kind of like it's a means for a bunch of artists to be able to be doing the work that

excites them. So the people that run this company, along with me, it's a whole bunch of people that we all have our own independent creative practices. And we've kind of found a business model that lets us teach a couple workshops a week and be able to do all the other stuff that we love doing that doesn't bring us any money. And I think that's kind of a lovely thing. It's a way to redistribute money among artists. You said it allows you to do other things, except you also do composing for... Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Rihanna. I assume you didn't do that for free. No, no, we didn't do that for free. But yeah, I mean, you know, the commercial projects, you know, I do love doing for a variety of reasons i think um yeah like one of the

questions that you sent me in the thing before is kind of like how would you describe your career and i think like a big a big motivator for me it's just i love the craft of making sound and i kind of felt like even though i went through conservatory and all that where i i honestly i got a lot of flack for trying to turn that into my job as opposed to just doing it for the love of it. But I really do love the technical process of composing and sound designing. And I do think of it as kind of part of my creative practice. But the art projects that I do for fun that don't make any money, those are still a thing that are important to me.

And so I try to keep those along in the background. And the whole idea of dogmatic was really coming up with a system that would allow us to take commercial work and then ultimately channel that into things that are kind of, dare I say, more altruistic. Things that are like art projects or workshops or stuff like that. Teaching is very different than engineering. Sure. Teaching, I like writing. I like engineering. Turned out I didn't so much like teaching.

Oh, really? I mean, I like mentoring smaller groups, but the larger group, it was just too much for my introverted self. But these are different skills and different interests. Yeah. How do you balance them? Or do you just like doing all of them so much, whatever comes, comes?

I think I'm more of a teacher than I am an engineer, truthfully. Like, the things that I get excited about are, like, demystifying things to people. I really love getting a satisfying explanation for how something complicated works i i find it to be like a really kind of uh you know what's the term like uh oh shoot i can't think of a good term but it's uh it's empowering i guess you know to learn that you know things in your house work for reasons that are ultimately quite simple and understandable they just involve a lot of parts together uh like i come from a

performance background um i yeah this is a strange aside but i actually i i was a i was a very serious circus performer as a child i was dead set on becoming a professional juggler with my life at age 16. And people told me that was crazy and I would make no money. So I went into electroacoustic art music, you know, a much better thing. Now you've shown them. Yeah, I showed them right here with my swimming pool of gold coins. But yeah, it's just like I think the performance side of me really comes through like and so i do feel when i'm teaching i kind of feel like i'm a close-up magician almost i'm showing you a thing and then i get to explain you know pen and teller style

kind of how the trick works and uh that's really fun for me i i i kind of have figured out that a lot of the teachers in my life, even science teachers and stuff like that, that really stood out to me were actually teachers that had a performance background to some extent. So I think about teaching really like I think about storytelling. You know, there's a way that you can set up a lesson that provides like a lot of satisfying, you know, reassurance and also answers questions that you set up in a particular way. So, yeah. So, I mean, I kind of script all my classes, you know, so they kind of hit all those beats. Because those are the kinds of things that I know I responded really well to as a kid.

And, you know, I always loved learning. I really do. And I always kind of had a problem with school. So, I think that's kind of where I approach a lot of the stuff I do. And the storytelling makes so much sense. I love storytelling. Yeah. And that part of teaching was lots of fun, but the performance aspect... It's grading. Yeah. Was, I can see how some people love it. For me, it was not a great thing. Even though my students were fantastic and I loved what they were doing and I liked talking to them. But then afterwards, I was so exhausted I could do nothing.

So it was just a difference. Do you feel that way with podcasting? Oh, yes, I do. Okay. I just thought I'd ask. So the secret to podcasting is I end every podcast kind of soaked in gross sweat. Oh, no. I like talking to people.

I like being able to ask people questions and getting to know people and all of that. But yeah, there is an aspect to this, even though it's not visual, that at the end, I am pretty wiped. Oh, that's actually kind of a shock to me. I think you sound like a very natural podcast host in all the episodes I've heard of this show. Well, I mean, I really do like talking to people. And at the show notes, putting together the outline and doing a little bit of cyber snooping about people, reading the books. I love all that.

And as soon as we're done with this, it mostly goes into Cress's Ball. And I don't... I interact with the listeners, but I don't necessarily interact with them about specific episodes, because that just freaks me out. Yeah. Oh, okay. Now I get that good job and i'll be like yeah it was a great job i don't even want to remember um yeah truthfully i get insane stage fright when i perform in most settings you know

i think teaching is one that i found works pretty well for me, but I don't know why. I get stage fright recording videos. So, you know, because, you know, you're going to post them for other people. But I've got an infinite number of tries. So I don't know why it makes me red light. The red light is on. It's like, oh, no. Well, then, you know, people will be making snap judgments about you based on whatever you happen to record in that one take.

And no, I get it. It is totally anxiety inducing. You mentioned earlier that you make eccentric sounds for eccentric people. Sure. Yes. And your website, I believe it was talking about the term dogbotic. You combined dog and robot, and that was silly. And people constantly tell you that is silly and dumb.

And those aren't the people you want to work with. You want to work with the people who laugh. I guess so, yeah. I mean, there are a lot of sound companies out there with just incredibly generic names. I'm not going to list any of them. Just really incredibly generic names. And I wanted to get the kind of jobs that you would need a sense of humor in order to... You got to have a sense of humor to hire Dogbotik to do your campaign or whatever. So I'm really kind of happy that that has resulted in some pretty eccentric stuff.

And also just a lot of times people approach us and you know just say hey do what you do which is just you know that's always the best yes oh yeah but then they might they might not like what you do but at least the first try at least it gives you some idea that they're that they know about you it's like i want whatever these people do they're going to yeah making people happy is hard, you know. But we found a way to make it work. Okay, back to the classes. Workshops.

Right now, they cost 500 to 600 US. And these are mostly people paying for them. It's not really something companies pay for because they want those skills. Because while those skills are super useful and probably should be paid for by the companies, the way the workshop's pitched is more art-based.

Not a criticism. Not a criticism at all. I think that is the best way to do it. I'm thinking. Yeah. But how much do people fuss about the price? I mean, people fuss about the price when they don't really consider what they get out of it, I guess. But, you know, it has been fewer and fewer people.

I think, you know, when you realize that you get, you know, it's like 20 hours of content, plus you have unfettered access to a professional that does this work for months on end to really fine-tune what you're doing, I think it seems a lot more reasonable. But also, the price of the workshop includes shipping and all of the parts. And we also have a financial aid program that's counted and all that. So the model that we tried to make was basically, if people can't afford the $500 price tag, that ultimately pays for two other people to take the workshop. And, you know, and that's, you know, we feel good about that. You know, I would love for everyone who wants to learn how to do this stuff to be able to take it at no cost. But, you know, this is what we have to charge in order to keep the lights on, we found.

It totally makes sense. And it was, for us, it was the same, that there were seats for very reduced prices. Free ended up being kind of a problem sometimes because people didn't take it seriously, but very reduced prices, people did end up taking it seriously. yeah, I don't know. The psychology of marketing seems to be absolutely bizarre and we don't understand it. And that's why we're the size we are, I guess. But also, I think there is some legitimacy to working at the scale where we're working with 10 people in a workshop and stuff.

It really is quite intimate and there's no second-guessing what the intentions are. It really is, you know, to make art that you haven't made before. And that experience. Let's stop just making things. And a community to build with, yeah. Yeah.

Let's find the people and have the experience in the community. And making the things is valuable, but it's the information that's what you it's the information we learned along the way yeah that's exactly that being said some people have totally gotten like you know their big company to pay for their seat and in some workshops that are even less like technical sounding the diy synthesizers like one called ear retraining is a workshop I teach about media theory where you build your way through 20th century communications. So we build a phonograph, you build a radio,

you build a little sampler out of a circuit bent greeting card. And then you kind of talk about how to misuse all of those media. So they make sounds that weren't intended. So stuff like that, where it doesn't have an obvious usage, but they're really all the tiny little lessons that I've gleaned throughout the years of being a professional composer and the ones that really stuck with me. So I feel very fortunate that I have an outlet for that. Companies, managers, people should realize that any learning you do is good practice for more learning. Yeah, if only you ran the world, Alicia.

It'd all be different. Not better, but different. It would all be better. Yeah, I think it would be substantially better. I would like having a technically literate person in charge of the world. I wanted to ask, because we have a lot of artists and musicians on the show who get into electronics later in life or after music education. You mentioned you went to conservatory. How did you teach yourself electronics? Yes. And can you tell me how to teach myself electronics as somebody who should already know? Trial and error, dare I say? I went to music school ultimately i

kind of realized the reason i went to music school was to prove to myself i could go to music school i don't know why i assume that's why i went to physics grad school yeah you know it happens you know i went to music school and it took me a long time to realize that ultimately you know music school i'm i'm happy i i feel very lucky i had the chance to go um and also like i i think i kind of realized that the conservatory mentality just it's not it's not me like i don't enjoy writing music for you know an exclusive audience of people that can afford to understand it because they get the music theory in joke you're making and stuff like that and it's just you know i don't think it was the crowd that i really wanted to reach and so i guess

dog bodic was kind of my way of running away from that really quickly into a more you know experimental world and um how to teach yourself electronics i mean audio is a great place to begin circuit bending stuff is a great place to begin. Circuit bending stuff is a great place to begin because you're bound to get something interesting out of it and you don't have to know how something works in order to break it. But also, there are endless number of fantastic resources. Elliot Williams has a wonderful series of blog posts

on Hackaday all about making synthesizers with basic CMOS chips, which is pretty much what I do. Sebastian Tomczak, he's in Australia. He also has a whole bunch of really good forums online. And honestly, since we've started teaching these workshops, I don't think it's because of us necessarily, but the whole DIY synthesizer world has exploded. And there are so many amazing YouTube channels and stuff out there now that will teach you how to do this stuff. I personally like having someone

guide me through it step by step, and that's why I love a live workshop environment, and I don't think there's really any replacement for that. But fortunately, it seems like the world has only... The resources have gotten greater and also the community has gotten chummier and less homogenous, dare I say.

So that's a lovely thing. It really is. And the community aspect, do your workshops have a Discord? And do people hang out on Discord forever? Shockingly, yes. I'm not a Discord. I mean, I use it when people ask a question on Discord and I pop into it. But yeah, every workshop we do

has an associated Discord channel. People are incredibly active on it, which is kind of lovely. But it's great to have a resource throughout the week, not only when people can post a picture of their circuit and say it's not working and then I can figure it out, but also people

just post art that they find that they love, critical takes that they think are interesting, weird accidents that happened when they were making art and they ended up making something else, you know. And that's all great. Like, I really love that people can actually see other people's process throughout the week, you know, when we're not actually in a Zoom room together. If I were to take a class, how long should I plan? How many hours should I set aside per week? It really depends. I think in a lot of cases, I think, you know,

the more you play around with the material, the better. But I have learned from teaching a lot of these that people tend to sign up for these classes as a fun thing to do, right? And the last thing I want to do is completely scare them with a mountain of work that, you know, not everyone's going to get done. So I really try to bake the activity into the workshop itself, where I will at least build a prototype and I'll say, hey, look at it go. And then, you know, if you have an hour over the week, you can get it together. But I do think like with a lot of this stuff, it's just kind of gaining fluency with a new system.

And so the more time you can spend with it, like if you have two hours a week to spend playing around with circuitry, you will be so shocked at how quickly you'll learn. And again, like you hinted at it, like all the projects in the book are kind of, you know, they're kind of, you can exquisite corpse them. You can, you can add together different, different projects and they all kind of talk to one another. That's really kind of like the aha moment I find for a lot of people is when they build a kooky thing of their own and then they go, wait,

if I add on this chip here, suddenly all of this stuff will gain exponentially more complexity and I'll be able to get it to do this you know and that's really cool that's really where you know unique stuff comes about it's funny how often i hear people say i did well they don't say it like this but they do the prescribed actions they they do the project that's in the book. And they're like, okay, I followed the instructions. And somehow that's a disappointment. But it's not. That's the start. That's practice. Now create. Great. You're going to have to follow a couple build-it-yourself sheets before you make something truly inventive. But I think, yeah, it's not a hard thing to learn.

And I think once you're able to identify the components and once you can read a schematic, which are things that you can learn how to do in a day or so, electronics can really become paint-by-numbers. You can Google schematic for something complicated and put together the schematic. It's not necessarily a creative way of doing electronics, but it's very doable. It's like following a recipe. So back to the book for just a second.

Sure, sure. On the subject of the comprehensive nature of it, you have two appendices in the back um one of which is a list of synthesizer based or synthesizer adjacent compositions that inspired i think you and one is a very long list of synthesizer adjacent or based albums yeah how how much time did it take to to come up with those lists versus write the rest of the book because that would take me months they weren't that bad i mean you know i like really i'm a i'm a musician more than an engineer so a lot of the albums were you know things that weren't very hard for me to rattle off the the hard part was trying to ensure that there was you know diversity of countries in

there uh and you know there really is quite a bit. So some of them were, you know, they were all albums that I knew prior, but it did take maybe a couple hours of drafting to get it to 70. I don't know why I picked 70. I should have picked 75. It makes more sense.

I'm just excited because I only know like 30% of these, which I'm a musician too. And so I'm like a feeling like, why don't you know these? But yeah, there's some esoteric ones out there. But, you know,

I think, I think that's kind of the exciting part is just remembering that, Hey, there, there are a lot of bands out there, you know, don't worry if you think no one's listening to your music, you know,

there are a lot of other bands that no one's listening to as well. That's a comforting thought. I mean, it kind of is. I work as a... I'm actually... This is totally unrelated. I'm the head of sound at 924 Gilman, which is a punk club up here in Berkeley. It's where

Green Day and Operation Ivy and all these other bands, they all matriculated from 924 Gilman. And despite the fact that it has such a pedigree, it really has not strayed from where it started as a community music venue. So a lot of the shows that I work there, it's high schoolers that didn't really practice very much. And I love that. I love that there is a venue that allows for that because you need that in a community. Otherwise, they're never going to get good. And it's, I don't know, it's great to know that there is just an endless font of musical artists out there that are doing this work despite the fact that no one's really listening to it.

And that's a wonderful thing. So yeah, I don know i think i think i also try to encourage people is you know don't obsess over your spotify listeners it means nothing you know having 50 people to show up to a show means more both monetarily and emotionally than 10 000 spotify listeners you know you have a kit to go with your book um when does it ship? Well, it is shipping now. We are finally sending out all the pre-orders that were made before the holidays. It is an incredibly extensive kit. It's everything that you need to build everything in the book and then some.

For a long time, the only way that we sold kits was you had to take a workshop with us. But just over the years, we got hundreds of requests for freestanding kits. So that's the thing that we're trying to dip our toe into right now because we have a book and we have a good excuse. But oof, the margins are killing us, let me tell you. For $200 for the book and all of these parts? Yes. yes. I mean, I understand. It's what I would be happy to pay for it. Very happy because, my goodness, there's so much here. There's a lot of stuff in there. I mean, you can absolutely source the parts on your own.

We don't make the parts. We get them and we resell them. But it is reassuring for a lot of people to kind of just have a really simple high level, here's everything you need, and you don't have to worry about finding that weird NPN transistor or whatever. Yes, there's so much here. Yeah. So that's the moral of the story is kits are not a great business model, but they're very fun to open on christmas so having opened your book and knowing that chris is a drummer and um and then i'm already surrounded by a large number of synths and

electronic music you can say crap there's there's a lot of crap in this room there's a lot of crap no no and it's not crap it's there's just it's intimidating for those of us who aren't musically it's just knobs there's just knobs everywhere there are knobs and buttons everywhere like every possible service um where where where should we start with this book oh well okay well i have a i have a chrisspecific recommendation, too. But I would recommend, start at the beginning, do the first oscillator circuit. It's not hard to get working, and pretty much everything builds off of that initial circuit. So that's also a great thing about the workshop, is it's really like, once you have week two down, all you have to do is show up with a week two knowledge, and you'll be able to do every project um chris so fun story all of

those classic motown records that you hear don't actually have a snare drum on them huh what do i mean by that i mean the way that they recorded a snare drum in all like every classic motown record is uh they would have a white noise generator they would have a little noise gate on the white noise generator and when you hit the snare drum it would send a white noise generator. They would have a little noise gate on the white noise generator. And when you hit the snare drum, it would send a little impulse into that envelope generator. They were triggering electronic drugs in motels. Yes. Yes.

It's it's yeah. It's. And also what's even funnier is the, the white noise generator. It's a, it's Johnson noise. So it's, you,

you take a, you take a transistor, you rip off one of the legs and all the thermal noise from the universe is fed into it. So that's actually how those drums are recorded. And we show you how to do that. I think it's in the modulation chapter, there's a piezo

triggered VCA. And all that is, is it's a piezo, a little tiny crystal that you could buy for 25 cents that has two little wires coming off of it. You tape that to your snare drum, gator clip the piezo to this circuit, and when you hit the drum, and you can set the threshold needed to trigger the thing, it will make a white noise generator go and that's, you know, it's a pretty fun thing. So you can rig up your whole drum set to trigger electronic sounds, but you're still

playing it with an acoustic kit all right that's very cool and now i have to go listen to a bunch of motown records why did they do that like was it just i mean i know mike microphoning stuff was a real pain back then you probably got a lot of bleed and stuff but uh huh that's really weird i truthfully don't know this was an anecdote that I've been told this anecdote many times. I don't think I've really, I don't think I've been able to find that much evidence to support it, but it's such a good anecdote and it's good for the class, so I keep it in there. I believe it because, you know, back then the studio was not what it is now. So it's like trying to make something cut through a mix might have been a real challenge for certain kinds of music. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've lost Alicia. I went to open the book because I have the electronic version.

You have the paper copy. Oh, you've got a paper copy? Oh, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm holding. Oh, I had the electronic copy. about, well, about the time he started making fun of Theremin for being a narcissist, that this was going to be a paper copy sort of book. Because it was both readable and

something I wanted to open. That's how Chris got to see the slip book. Oh, that makes a lot of sense, yeah. Also, to the audience listening, Theremin's only a narcissist because he named his musical instrument after himself. But otherwise, I have very positive impressions of, Theremin's only a narcissist because he named his musical instrument after himself. But otherwise, I have very positive

impressions of Leon Theremin. Wait, can I tell you guys a story? Yes. This is just a good cocktail party anecdote that I really love. So, Leon Theremin, after he built the Theremin and was, you know, like a renowned electronics engineer in early 20th century Russia, he was actually kidnapped by the government and forced to live on the gulag where he made a lot of nefarious devices for the Russian government.

But one of the things that he built, which is just so fascinating, I think it's called The Thing. And it has its own Wikipedia page. It's a listening device. So what this was, was at some point in the Cold War or something, the USSR gave the United States this big seal of peace between our nations. And the United States hung this up in their embassy or whatever in Washington, D.C. Then, like years later, they started to realize, huh, the Russians seem to know an awful lot about these closed-door conversations happening in the U.S. embassy. And so they opened up this seal, and this is just so freaking brilliant. It's entirely passive, but what they found was this little tiny, like, bladder that was

hooked up to a big inductive coil of wire and the idea was as you talked in the room the vibrations of your sound would make the big seal diaphragm vibrate the big seal diaphragm would change the volume of the bladder right and that bladder was hooked up to a big coil of wire so at the russian embassy 300 away, all they had to do was fire a big, loud radio wave at the exact resonance of that coil of wire. And they could tell by how that radio wave was attenuating and signal, they could reconstruct the audio waves that were going on inside the U.S. embassy. So it's a kind of shockingly brilliant thing. It's an entirely passive listening device. And of course, as you probably would put together, this is RFID.

This is like how every RFID circuit works. When you pay to go on public transit with your credit card or something, it's basically the same idea. It's just not working with the same frequency of wave. Amazing. Isn't that cool?

That is great. We have theremin created this amazing spy device. I'm sure not by choice. Yeah, anyway. Fun character. Oh, I have asked about the workshops. I have noted that they are not free. And now I should ask you

if you have any discounts for them. Oh, yes, I do. Through the 31st of this year, thanks to one of my coworkers, if you use... 2025. No, it's 2024. 2024.

Correct. 2024. So you got limited time. Limited time. Yeah, if you use DogBot10 at checkout, it'll take 10% off. And that works for any of the workshops that we do. We have 14 workshops at this point. We're launching a new one in February about building your own radios.

Come on. He just signed up for an intense drum workshop. I can't take them all. I want to. Well, hopefully we'll be around by the time your drum workshop is done. Yeah, no, it's really great. I mean, I love the people I work with, and I love that the workshop offerings are just so much more broad

than anything I would be able to teach on my own, because I only know so much. But Aisha Lowe, she's a great friend. She makes all these beautifully inventive homemade guitar pedals. She teaches a whole workshop. She makes all these beautifully inventive homemade guitar pedals. She teaches a whole workshop. No. Yeah. Abby Oresi, who was, interestingly enough, actually a professor at music school that I went to that then reached out to me about teaching a workshop.

She teaches one about musical robots. So you build a little Arduino thing that plays the drums. Like, you know, it's stuff that should exist. You know, I want more drummer robots and less missiles in the world, you know. Well, and I have found that when I take art workshops, usually paper-based, if you can talk somebody you know into doing it with you, it's even more fun. Yeah. I totally agree. It's, you know, yeah, it's good to take a workshop with a buddy but i also

find that you know you meet more people by yourself you you do meet more people right because you're not only going to talk to that other person but also just like i don't know how we have avoided a douchebag synth bros for so many years we really have like there, there's a whole, you know, there's a particular crowd of people that, like, I just, we've been able to avoid. And the people that we get in the workshops are honestly just the sweetest, most interesting people. And oftentimes, well, pretty much all the time, the coolest projects I see are because two random people in the workshop end up having some digression that ends up inspiring both of them to do something just completely off the wall. So, you know, Kirk, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Otherwise I'm going to ask you 97 more questions and we'll be here for three

more hours. That's okay. I have, I have one anecdote. Your last one was a hit, so I'm up for it. Okay. This is a weird anecdote. I've been thinking about a lot recently. So I'm going to complain about a movie that I've never seen. Do you remember the movie Yesterday? The Danny Boyle movie? Yeah.

The guy wakes up and he's the only person. He's the only one that remembers the Beatles. And so he recreates their songs and then he feels kind of bad about it. But then there are people who remember the Beatles but couldn't recreate the songs. And in the end, they like him a lot. Okay, there. Right. That's it.

That's perfect. So I've never seen this movie. But I think it reveals a kind of deep insecurity about me, the more that I think about the premise of the movie. So I kind of think, like, you know, I certainly thought growing up, right, the Beatles are great because they wrote great songs and the cultural artifact of the Beatles is great. You know, whatever. That's a very standard thing to think. And the whole movie is based on that premise, right? Wait, have you heard the songs?

Stop. Revolution 9, you kidding me? Are you on the dance floor yet? No, but that's kind of the model I was taught to think about culture, right? This Starry Night is a great painting and that is why it is famous. Now, when you start to think about the premise of the Yesterday movie, you start to realize, okay, one, can you imagine She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah? Like making a crowd of teenagers incredibly horny in 2018 or whenever that movie came out?

No, She Loves You. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to hold your hand. Yeah, right. It's just like, no, you obviously would not have that kind of reaction unless the Beatles were in the context they were in, looking the way they did, presented in the medium they were presented in. That seems so obvious. Second level, can you imagine some rant, like the worst guitar player you went to college with

playing his version of She Loves You? Like, no, you absolutely can't. So it seems like when you think about the Yesterday movie, the more you start to arrive at the conclusion that the cultural artifact is completely unrelated to the effect it has, right? Like this guy's cover of the song, despite the fact that it's a good song or not, right. Is not going to have the same impact. And I think that that's kind of a thing that like, I don't know. I was, I had anxiety about for a long time that I would write a piece of music

that was inherently great, you know, but I really think what yesterday proved to me, the more I thought about the movie is that the cultural artifact is completely meaningless and it has everything to do with context and nothing to do with content. So, you know, I think I kind of think that's optimistic, actually. Like, you know, it's not it's not up to you what people are interested in and you should keep on making the cultural artifacts that you make. Right. Yeah. So anyway, I think it's like a lot of people that I went to music school with also kind of had that mentality that music school would teach you how to write something amazing.

But really, like, if you stop to think about it, I just don't think that's how culture works. You know, anyway, that's extremely popular that most musicians and artists, you know, look askance at and it's like, well, come on, why is everybody into this when we've got this over here that nobody's listening to? And I mean, like you say, it's, that's how culture works. Oh, yeah, popularity has nothing to do with quality. But, you know, but I also think that means, you know, yeah, you should be making your own culture, you know, who knows what's going to stick to the wall. That's true. The more people making culture, the better. And the culture is, is your goal to make a lasting cultural shift? Or is your goal to make people happy right now? That's a great question.

Goals don't have to be the same well i think i think everyone who makes art wants to be appreciated unless unless you're completely well balanced and you just don't care what people think like jd salinger or something right but i kind of don't believe those people though like no we've all met an artist that's like yeah i just do it for for my own love i don't care if anyone listens but like no you i do care if people listen. I'm attracted to music because I love the community that it can bring. And so ultimately, yeah, I make music for other people. Our guest has been Kirk Pearson, composer, musician, teacher, founder at Dogbotic. They are the author of Makes Electronic Music From Scratch. Find it at your usual bookstore or online. Thanks, Kirk. Thank you so much. This was a pleasure.

Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Memfault for sponsoring the show. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now a quote to leave you with from Ludwig van Beethoven. Tones sound and roar and storm about me until I have set them down into notes.