Pumping Station: One

It’s that time of the month again: time to gather together all of the loud things that you have and bring them to Pumping Station: One for an evening of fun!

This Friday, March 12, at 7pm, Pumping Station: One is hosting its monthly Unusual Musical Instrument Jam! We’ll be running it synchronously with i3Detroit again this month. As always, we welcome anything that makes noise…bring your electronics, your toys, your common household items, even your musical instruments if that’s your bag. If it’s loud, we’d love to see and hear it!

The event is open to the public, and free.

[Image by buhny on Flickr, licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.]

The Unusual Musical Instrument Jam on January 8th was a rousing good time! A loud group of members and guests alike came to the space. People brought instruments both electronic and analog, both traditional and non-traditional…and we made a lot of noise. A big thank you to everyone who came out for the event! A big thanks as well to i3Detroit, who originated the idea and also streamed their cacophony online.

It was so much fun that the Unusual Musical Instrument Jam will now be a monthly event, on the second Friday of every month! So, mark your calendars for February 12 at 7:00pm, bring anything you’d like to play or share, and get ready to jam!

Our fellow hackers at i3Detroit came up with a great idea: the Unusual Musical Instrument Jam Session. The premise is simple: you come to the hackerspace and bring anything you have that makes noise, whether it was intended for musical purposes or not. You get together with everyone else who has also brought their favourite noise-making objects, and improvise some music together!

They’re hosting this event at their space on the evening of January 8th–and suggested that we do it synchronously with them. So, we shall!

You are invited to join the Pumping Station: One Cacophony Club at 7:00pm on Friday, January 8th for the Unusual Musical Instrument Jam Session! Bring anything you have that makes noise: Arduino concoctions, your voice, circuit-bent toys, traditional instruments, synthesizers–if you can create sound with it, it’s welcome! We’ll jam out, goof off, and show our friends at i3Detroit (as well as each other!) what we can do with objects that may or may not have been designed to make music in the first place.

This event is free, and open to members and guests alike.

(CC licensed image from Collin_Mel on flickr.)

On December 3, Jeff rebooted Transistor Thursdays with a “Solder Your Own Freeduino” class.  I had never played with an Arduino before, so I excitedly took the class.  I soldered it together, jumped for joy when the tests worked, and did the classic Arduino “hello world” of making an LED blink.  I played around with that for a little while, and then I got other ideas.

As anyone who has seen me play with my Commodores knows, I enjoy getting things to make noise.  Blinky is fun, but for me, loud is even more fun.  I went to my locker, cut a speaker off of a circuit board that I had already harvested for a few other parts for other projects, and hooked that up to the Arduino.  I then started familiarizing myself with the music coding commands…and didn’t stop until I had my Arduino playing something that was guaranteed to inspire people to throw ping pong balls at me.

The fact that the Arduino code loops over and over again until you cut the power meant there was only one song I could possibly choose for this:  The Song That Never Ends.