The radio
The radio was my entrance into performing with home-built/hand-made electronics. The beige box* on the right houses the simplest shortwave radio design I could find and build. Proceeding from there I modified it so that the tuning coils for the radio are on the outside, with the idea that I could interchange coils as I was perfoming.
I continued to expand on the original design and added a bank of external coils (to the left) which can be switched in and out of the circuit.
I further expanded the design and added a feedback loop, through the bank of coils, controlled by the blue knob on the black box (forground).
But by far the biggest and most important addition was the five copper "touch pads" on the top of the black box. Each pad connects to various componets (chosen at random) of the radio, so by touching the pads with my fingers I can effectively (through the resistance and capcitance of my skin) become part of the circuit.
The oscillators
The oscillators are exactly that: two basic square-wave oscillators. But what makes them perhaps different is their control.
The white rectangle in the foreground is a "light-table": a piece of white acrylic with LEDs embedded in the sides. Sitting on this are the four 'pucks', two violet and two yellow, each containing a photo-resistor. One of each set (the round ones) control the pitch of each oscillator while the others (square) contol the amplitude and filtering.
The mixer
The mixer is a four-by-four matrix mixer. Matrix mixers differ from regular mixers in that they allow mixing from the output of any device to the input of any other (and/or multiple devices). This includes the output of any device back into it's self Here is a picture of the mixer under construction.