Community Informed Instrument Design
Designing an innovative musical instrument with a community of young musicians and professional artists.
This year CLIP reached a memorable milestone in our journey as a social enterprise. The launch of our first ever instrument, the Photon Smasher, represents not only our first product, but an incredible opportunity to extend our organisational mission to a wider audience and create exciting opportunities for the young musicians and artists we work with.
In September 2019, CLIP invited artist award winning electronic artist Loula Yorke to run a girls only synth building workshop as part of our Youth Music funded music club at Firstsite, Colchester. The group set about building Atari Punk Consoles (small DIY synthesisers) and creating brilliant improvised performances using them. During the workshop we combined the circuits with LDRs (light dependant resistors) and explored how light could control the circuit. This was a wildly successful test with the sounds being triggered and modulated by light. After myself and fellow CLIP co-founder Simon Keep did some initial tests at home, another workshop followed in February 2020 where we hooked up solar panels directly to amplifiers and began listening to light itself.
The success of this workshop led us to consider how we could share this discovery with others - educators and musicians alike. The synchronisation of light and sound was spectacular, and a huge hit with the young musicians at our music club. They were jamming along to the rhythms of bicycle lights and putting the sounds through guitar pedals, creating other-worldly soundscapes.
The workshop was crammed with learning outcomes all as a result of play. There were conversations between the musicians about how microphones work, and what the electromagnetic spectrum is (answered by our students at GCSE age). But alongside these traditional STEM (science technology engineering maths) topics, the creative outputs were beautiful too. The workshop created incredible opportunities for dramatic soundscapes and room-filling light installations.
After significant development and investment, we created a series of standalone prototype instrument which were distributed amongst our young people for testing and making music with. The feedback we recieved fed into the final design of the product and the music they created subsequently became the soundtrack for our teaser trailer. Since launching the producet we've continued to explore all the different sounds possible with it, which has opened lots of exciting possibilities, such as thinking of it as a sensory experience. The vibrant LED displays associated with sensory environments sound amazing through the instrument. CLIP has always been about making music as accessible as possible, and theres some intrinsictly exciting about making music simply by waving a light. This is definitely something we would like to develop further in future iterations of the product.
The launch of our own product is an exciting milestone in the CLIP story. From beginning in 2016 as a monthly meetup at Firstsite gallery to registering as a CIC in December 2019, it’s been an incredible journey focused around play centred learning, creating opportunities for young musicians and making incredible music. The Photon Smasher extends the reach of our mission to a far wider audience and we can’t wait to see and hear what people create with it. The Photon Smasher is available to buy now (UK only) from our website here.
