Make:cast – Making New Music With Helen Leigh

Maker News Music
Make:cast – Making New Music With Helen Leigh

By Dale Dougherty

Dale Dougherty

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

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“All instruments are inventions and all music is made up — so make your own using microcontrollers,” writes Helen Leigh in Volume 76 of Make Magazine, encouraging people to create and invent musical instruments, as she has.

Subscribe to Make:cast on Itunes or Google Podcasts. You can also find it on Spotify, Deezer, Podcast Addict, PodChaser and Spreaker. A list of previous episodes of Make:cast can be found here.

Helen Leigh in her Portland OR workshop

In this conversation with Helen Leigh, we learn about her upbringing in Wales, how she first learned about electronics at a makerspace in London, why she objects to call herself “self-taught” and her new lab in Portland Oregon. She came from a family that consumed lots of music and her early musical experiences were singing choral music in church in Wales. Her work today still bears the influences of sounds of the high church of her childhood. We talk about why harpsichords went of out fashion and how electronic music got started with pioneers such as Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire.

We talk about technology from reel-to-reel tape recorders to synthesizers and to making electronic music with Makey-Makey and the Bela board. Helen is an advocate for people learning how to make their own instruments, to experiment with music and be makers of your own kind of music.

Helen with Jello Bongos

Links:

Excerpts

Basically I walked into this makerspace (FabLab London) and there was tools going and laser cutters and 3d printers and people just hanging out and making things. And I just felt, I don’t know, I just felt like I had come home. It was very exciting to me. And I’ve never left makerspaces and hacker spaces since. It was a pretty happy he accident that I came to making. It was just through being hired to write on the maker project that I just fell in love with it.

***

I’m talking to you here from my little office here in Portland, Oregon. I’ve just immigrated here a couple of months ago. So I’ve been resetting up my workbench with my tools and so on. I came here from Berlin, which is where I was for two and a half years. Amazing hacker culture in Berlin, by the way, everybody should go visit that city. But of course, like none of my power tools will work coming over from the electricity is not the same. I’ve had to re resupply my workbench. Having the tools for me has given the sense of possibility — you see these things. I’ve always been somebody who creates things based on the materials that I have around me.

***

I spent a lot of time singing actually. I was in both the school choir and the choir for the church of Wales as well. And it wasn’t like I was religious, but it was a way to get paid for singing. And I was there in a full floor-length cassock, a burgundy cassock. I had the white rough around my neck, singing angelically.

***

Like any kind of technology that becomes popular enough to to make it into maybe not mainstream, but at least, they are accessible to people who would be interested in it. You’re going to get people who start to play around with things. And this new audio tape technology found its way into the hands of some people who just wanted to mess around with it. There was a group of people in France who were the musique concrète people. Basically there’s new technology available to people and they started messing around with it and started creating new techniques, new sounds, and new ways of making music.

***

I use lots and lots of different boards to make music with. And sometimes I don’t use boards at all. Shocking, I know. But the MakeyMakey is probably my go-to introductory board. Particularly for people with families, it’s just such a nice way to make like music and and you can actually create all sorts of fun things using it and it’s pretty simple to do. You don’t have to use any code or anything. And I would say, like the other end, that non entry level and the slightly more advanced, it would be the the Bela (board). So the Bela is what my go-to is for complex embedded and instrument design. It’s over a hundred dollars. So it’s not it’s not like a beginner board. But it’s like a single-board computer based on a BeagleBoard. I’m happy to say a cape for the BeagleBoard right there. It’s got some fancy analog to digital converters and analog and lots of digital IO as well.

***

The students (in a music class Helen taught) all had a choice of whether to create a digital plug-in for me, or create a physical instrument. Interestingly, most of them chose to do the physical instrument. I think that’s partially because it’s novel. And people like to hold something in their hands. It’s just fun to explore. It is human. It is exciting and fun and new.

Actually, I think, we are in a golden age of being able to experiment with technology and I think it’s just getting more accessible. I really want to see maker techniques and new tools and new materials being used to encourage a world where more people can invent their own instruments.

By Dale Dougherty

Dale Dougherty

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

View more articles by Dale Dougherty

Skill Builder: Write Your Code Like NASA Does

Maker News
Skill Builder: Write Your Code Like NASA Does
Allyson Aberg

By Allyson Aberg

Allyson Aberg

Interested in everything software and robots!

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As a software engineer, I’m always looking for new ways to improve the quality of my code. When I stumbled upon a set of rules for writing safety critical code, published by NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (http://pixelscommander.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/P10.pdf), I was more than intrigued! The idea of writing software so robust that it can be trusted to launch rockets and orbit satellites was definitely exciting, so I tried to figure out how I could apply these rules to my own code. While these rules were originally mean for code written in C, I’ve found that we can repurpose some of them into general guidelines for whatever language our own projects are written in, like Python for the Raspberry Pi! 

The most applicable “guidelines” I found from NASAs rules are as follows:

1. Keep It simple: Be intentional with what you write, and keep things concise. More practically, this could mean keeping your functions very small and targeted. Rather than having a single function that does many things, split each task into its own function for better modularity.

2.Write unit tests: While unit tests are often a pain to write, they can definitely save you in the long run as they have the ability to tell you exactly when, where, and (hopefully) why something has failed.

3. Pay attention to warnings, leave all warnings on: I’m someone who tends to selectively ignore the warnings my compiler is giving me, but learning how to read and interpret the warnings you’re receiving can make all the difference in writing clean, robust code.

My own goal is to try to apply these rules as often as possible, and (maybe) I’ll one day get to send something to space!

Allyson Aberg

By Allyson Aberg

Allyson Aberg

Interested in everything software and robots!

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Makers Unite Desk

Maker News
Makers Unite Desk

By Will Holman

Will Holman

Will Holman is the general manager of Open Works. A maker himself, he is the author of Guerilla Furniture Design, out now from Storey Publishing.

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One year ago, I stood in the lobby of Open Works — the makerspace in Baltimore where I work — and watched our members pack their studio supplies into their cars and leave, one by one. On Monday, March 16th, we had been shut down by order of the Governor’s office as Covid-19 cases began spreading through Maryland. By Friday, we knew it was going to be a lot longer than that. By the end of the weekend, we were in the PPE business, fueled by a viral social media post and an army of volunteers.

That project, named Makers Unite, made 28,270 face shields by mid-June. 388 volunteers across the state 3D-printed headbands and dropped them off at Open Works. Our crew assembled, packaged, and distributed them with help from our friends at Innovation Works. This is a familiar story from the pandemic, as thousands of grassroots maker groups eventually manufactured millions of units of PPE. It also illustrates how makers can rapidly scale low-hierarchy, self-organizing systems to solve hyper-local supply shortages.

By early July, Open Works was back open. But the downward trend in case counts didn’t last past the summer. Baltimore City Schools announced they would remain remote for the fall. Open Works was operating under 25% capacity caps by order of the Mayor. As the fall semester wound down, and it became clear remote school would last the winter, I heard about a group two counties over that had started making desks for young students who couldn’t afford one. Called Desks by Dads, this informal group organized build days on Facebook, linking dozens of garage workshops into a crowdsourced factory. 

I talked to one of the volunteers, Stephen Smith, in late December. He shared with me some of their triumphs, and also told me the bottlenecks were assembly time (2-3 hours per desk) and delivery (hard to fit assembled desks in a car). I challenged Zach, our Contract Services Manager, to come up with a flat-pack design that could be cut on our CNC. He cut a prototype held together with just zip ties and wedges — an idea cribbed from our friend Bill Young at ShopBot. After three prototypes, we had stripped it down to a simple, stable, and inexpensive design.

On January 20th, we launched a request form on the listserv for Baltimore City School principals. By the 22nd, we had a whopping 4,390 requests from 73 schools across Baltimore! We closed the form, set up a donation link on our website, ordered some plywood, and got cutting! We released the design as an open-source download a week later, and Stanley Black and Decker’s makerspace and the National Aquarium’s exhibit shop started contributing desks to the project using their own CNC routers. We’ve delivered 274 desks and stools so far, and hope to get 1,000 out the door by the end of the semester. 

The desk is designed so that the end user can put it together themselves — just four wedges, two zip ties, and a few tenons. In that way, it becomes a STEM lesson for the young people receiving them. The blank plywood has become a platform for their creativity, with students customizing them with paint, collage, and glitter. Even though we can’t gather in person right now, this project manages to bring everything we love about makerspaces home — community, friends, and great builds. Makers Unite!

Want to make desks for your community? Download the .dxf file and documentation here, check out the assembly video here, or pay a desk forward for a child in need. 

By Will Holman

Will Holman

Will Holman is the general manager of Open Works. A maker himself, he is the author of Guerilla Furniture Design, out now from Storey Publishing.

View more articles by Will Holman

Maker Spotlight: Leif Maginnis

Maker News
Maker Spotlight: Leif Maginnis
Jennifer Blakeslee

By Jennifer Blakeslee

Jennifer Blakeslee

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It’s always a pleasure when a maker that we’ve met at Maker Faire turns up in an unexpected place. That’s just what happened this week when Maker Faire Bay Area maker Leif Maginnis was put to the test on the History Channel show Assembly Required. Last we saw his work, he was busy in the MFBA 2018 Dark Expo Hall with his Light Bodies exhibit, an interactive light sculpture using motion sensors, lasers, and phosphorescence to capture eerie outlines of bodies in motion.

This time, he was competing against other talented makers for the chance of a prize. The challenge: a dog house. Watch the full episode (#4) and check out Leif’s winning, ultra-modern canine palace as well as the other stellar entries.

This is not the first time Leif has joined a maker-focused reality TV show. Back in the early 2000’s he competed in, and won, an episode of Monster House. After spotting him online, we caught up with Leif to find out what he’s been making since we last met up at Maker Faire.

First and last name:

Leif Maginnis

Where are you located? 

Los Angeles, CA

What is your day job? 

Maker, Fabricator, Welder

Do you attend a makerspace/fablab/hackerspace? 

Crash Space

Find Leif on Instagram

What kinds of stuff do you make? 

Small precision things from brass, stainless, and titanium.

How did you get started making stuff? 

Art school!

What is something that you’ve made that you’re really proud of? 

A titanium dice set.

What is next on your project list? 

Infrared video of welding

What is something you’d like to work with but you haven’t yet? 

High speed camera for build videos.

Any advice for people reading this? 

There is no excuse to not know stuff. You can learn basically anything from watching videos online. Before the internet, learning new skills or doing research often meant spending lots of time at a library. It was incredibly inefficient compared to what is available now. Take advantage of it!

Or show others how to do something…

Jennifer Blakeslee

By Jennifer Blakeslee

Jennifer Blakeslee

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Cricut Listened To The Community, Is Abandoning Unfair Limitations

Maker News
Cricut Listened To The Community, Is Abandoning Unfair Limitations

By Caleb Kraft

Caleb Kraft

Senior Editor for Make: I get ridiculously excited seeing people make things. I just want to revel in the creativity of the masses! My favorite thing in the world is sharing the hard work of a maker.

I'd always love to hear about what you're making, so send me an email any time at caleb@make.co

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Over the past week the community has been quite vocal in their disapproval of a plan by Cricut to limit usage of existing machines, requiring a monthly fee in order to cut more than 20 designs per month.

Today they have announced that they are completely abandoning this concept. They heard the complaints, and they’ve reversed their plans with the following statement.

Dear Cricut Community,  

On Friday, March 12, we announced an intention to limit the number of personal images and patterns that members can upload to Design Space without a Cricut Access subscription. We updated this plan on March 16 and shared that we intended to study the matter further. My team has spent the week listening, learning, and taking in a lot of feedback. Not every decision we make is perfect, but we take every opportunity to learn and get better.  

So, we’ve made the decision to reverse our previously shared plans. Right now, every member can upload an unlimited number of images and patterns to Design Space for free, and we have no intention to change this policy. This is true whether you’re a current Cricut member or are thinking about joining the Cricut family before or after December 31, 2021.                                       

We care deeply about every single member of our community, and it’s your creativity that keeps us motivated, excited, and passionate every day about what we’re building here at Cricut.  

Thank you for your candor and your commitment to our company and community. We appreciate you. 

ashish arora (Cricut ceo)   

While the initial move may have left a bitter taste in your mouth, the decision to accept a misstep and reverse the plans should be praised, in my opinion. Of course we don’t know what the future holds for Cricut or their plans, but at least you can see that they’re listening.

By Caleb Kraft

Caleb Kraft

Senior Editor for Make: I get ridiculously excited seeing people make things. I just want to revel in the creativity of the masses! My favorite thing in the world is sharing the hard work of a maker.

I'd always love to hear about what you're making, so send me an email any time at caleb@make.co

View more articles by Caleb Kraft

The Maker Music Festival Is Looking For Musicians

Maker News Music
The Maker Music Festival Is Looking For Musicians

By Caleb Kraft

Caleb Kraft

Senior Editor for Make: I get ridiculously excited seeing people make things. I just want to revel in the creativity of the masses! My favorite thing in the world is sharing the hard work of a maker.

I'd always love to hear about what you're making, so send me an email any time at caleb@make.co

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There’s an event coming up soon that looks particularly interesting. This is a music festival focusing on makers and performers of unique and DIY instruments. The Maker Music Festival , is reimagining itself as a virtual event and has opened their “call for makers”.

The Maker Music Festival 2021 website will be a campus of imaginary buildings that house the work of makers from around the world. Participating makers will have a space in one of the eight buildings on campus, each named after a pioneer of music invention. The goal is to allow participants to explore, learn, meet and enjoy the 100+ music makers in an experience similar to a real world ‘open studios’ tour. They can navigate from building to building and ‘visit’ the inhabitants therein. Each maker has provided a video, images and text that describes themselves and their work, with links to their social media, additional videos and their website. And just like IRL, visitors can ‘tip’ a music maker via the maker’s chosen payment method like Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee.

The campus of buildings metaphor has allowed collectives and other groups to ‘own’ their own buildings. Groups such as Hackoustic (London, England), MakeMe (Rennes, France), MakerNet (Shenzhen, China) and Center for New Music (San Francisco, CA) will occupy entire buildings and plans are being made for Makey Makey banana piano makers as well as others to be announced in the upcoming weeks. “We have an opportunity to create the largest gathering of music makers, and even better, we have created a place where their works can be archived and organized for others to enjoy,” said Sherry “as we build a community that will continue to grow along with projects from makers from around the world.” The website will serve as a hub for this community and there will be continuing live events and other activities.

The call for makers is open now, and will be until April 15th. To apply, go to the website for the Maker Music Festival and sign up!

By Caleb Kraft

Caleb Kraft

Senior Editor for Make: I get ridiculously excited seeing people make things. I just want to revel in the creativity of the masses! My favorite thing in the world is sharing the hard work of a maker.

I'd always love to hear about what you're making, so send me an email any time at caleb@make.co

View more articles by Caleb Kraft

Make:cast – Making Things That Don’t Yet Exist

Maker News
Make:cast – Making Things That Don’t Yet Exist

By Dale Dougherty

Dale Dougherty

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

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Industrial Designer Neil Cohen

How do you transform ordinary stuff into meaningful things, even beautiful things? How you make things that don’t yet exist, something original rather than a copy? That’s the topic of this conversation between New York-based industrial designer Neil Cohen and Dale Dougherty of Make Magazine. “Some of what I do in my work is making something that starts out one way,” he says, “And then when you do something to it, it forms into something else or reveals something else.”

Neil is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and after college, he got on a motorcycle going around the country to see what products companies were making. After that tour, he working in Steuben glass factory, exploring ideas in glass-making. He has designed toys, which allowed him to play with shrink wrap and make gargoyles out of Alka Seltzer tablets. He talks about how sometimes it’s not the banana, but the banana peel that becomes the thing you make. It’s not always what you first set out to make; it’s what you discover while making it.

Podcast

Subscribe to Make:cast on Itunes or Google Podcasts. You can also find it on Spotify, Deezer, Podcast Addict, PodChaser and Spreaker. A list of previous episodes of Make:cast can be found here.

Video

Excerpts

I’ve been making things since I was a real young child. We had a basement and a backyard and an entire neighborhood where you could do things with the things you made. And so I started making things of my own, including all the plans from Popular Science, like hang gliders and sail cars and things that had motors on them.

Neil in his go-kart – 1975

I think it takes a bit of play really. And I think that for successful people in any area, there’s a risk and there’s a sense of playfulness that one might acquire over time that says, I should try that, or I can do that. Or why does it do that? And I think those are some of the best questions to start out with is looking at something or maybe imagining something that you’d like to do to try to figure out how am I going to get there?

And I think that’s the fun of it is when you finally get there and tell people how you got there, they were very surprised. And you look at them and say, It seems natural to me to stand this way or turn it upside down or turn it inside out, or rip it in half and put the two ends together that weren’t touching. And now it works.

****

A mentor of mine, a teacher, professor at Rhode Island School of Design said to me: “Neil, every year or so we find someone who comes in with a lot. And what we try to do is unwind that one person and rewind them. They’ve got everything they need without us, but we unwind that and turn it into something that can be set loose in the world and be productive.” And I really appreciated that because I know they were talking about me at that time and what it is I might do and bring to the world and the profession

****

Neil with a more recent motorcycle

I had a trip I took right after college. I bought myself a nice two- cylinder BMW motorcycle, and I packed it with a Kodak slide reel and some clothes, and I drove it to almost 40 States in the United States, I stopped at phone booths, know what those are? I looked at yellow pages and tore the pages out for companies that do design work and that have industrial design departments.

And I’ve probably made over a hundred interviews with no intent on staying anywhere. And it confused everyone I interviewed .They said, so are you going to be in town or are you going to stay in Cincinnati? You’re going to, and I said, Nope, just interviewing and they wondered what are you doing that for it? I said, I want to see what everyone’s doing. And I want to show everyone what I’ve been doing.

****

I’ve been in lots of glass factories in the world where they didn’t know what I meant. They didn’t know what I really wanted. And I would say to them to their surprise, let me show you, I can do it. Let me show you what I mean. And I would do things in their factory that they didn’t do because they weren’t willing to exploit the tools.

And they had such a strong technical ethic that they weren’t willing to go outside of the technical realm that they were familiar with. And I said, it doesn’t matter right now. It’s not a product. There’s no commerce. There’s nothing. Let me just show you what I mean. And what I mean is the thing I’ve become really good at conveying to people who have to make it on the other side, but knowing what it should or couldn’t do.

****

And so ideas of this material over another material, as a toy, a doll that you could walk away with and play with all come from my own play in my studio. And it’s messy and it’s dirty. And there’s scraps that look like something, and you look at them and you say, actually, the scrap is more important than the thing that I made. Forget the thing I made, let me exploit the scrap. That’s what it is. The result of this, the garbage, the leftover, the banana peel, not the banana. And you have to be looking at that stuff all the time to say, I know I’m going down this path over here, but.

Don’t forget to look over there because there’s something over there.

By Dale Dougherty

Dale Dougherty

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

View more articles by Dale Dougherty