BETHANY CHILDS: My name is Bethany Childs, and I go to the Art Institute of Chicago.

[BETHANY CHILDS PLAYING A CONCH SHELL TO CONTROL MAX/MSP]

I play folk rock music [GIGGLES] but I'm interested in like traditional and experimental types of music. I've always liked the sound of conch shell horns whenever I heard them, and so I really wanted to make something with the conch shell, and I was just thinking about the like electronic stuff we are learning so I decided to run it then sound through a microphone into a Max/MSP patch and then send the input out again through the speaker so I could have a sort of a drone sound and then play a melody on top of it.

If I loop, it's realtime audio so it has a delay in it which I can turn on or off so either I'm playing and it's coming out the speaker at the same time like the noise that I'm playing but pitch shifted, or I can delay it so I can play and then a little bit later it will come out.

[BETHANY CHILDS PLAYING A CONCH SHELL TO CONTROL MAX/MSP]

It took a little bit of learning to learn, to get the trumpet. It's sort of the same technique as you would use to play a trumpet. It's just like pursing your lips, getting a tight buzz in your lips to get a sound out of the shell.

I actually bought this shell on eBay. That's the only place I could find conch shells; they're kind of hard to find. I searched a bunch of stores but when I went online to figure out how to make it into a horn, like a shell into a horn, they said you needed a really big one, a big conch shell, to get a good sound, and so when I saw this one, it was bigger than what I expected. When I got it, it was 14" or something.

Right at the beginning, drilling this hole was the most difficult. I went down to the wood shop, and then I didn't know -- the SAIC wood shop, and didn't know exactly what to do. I was thinking of trying to saw it off, so someone there helped me and we got like a mason saw for metal, and when we were trying to work at this for a long time and it just wasn't going anywhere. It's like pure calcium and really strong and hard to get through. So we finally sawed off the whole tip here, which probably like stuck out that much more, and there was still no hole in my shell.

It was just solid, so then we got an amazing drill and then drilled into it, and then we had like three people holding the shell and then pushing on this drill and finally got a little tiny hole, and I didn't know what size hole I needed, and so I thought that that was fine, and I tried for like a week and a half to play the shell and I couldn't get it to make any noise, so then I went up more online and it needed to be a bigger hole.

And one of my classmates at school had a diamond -- yeah, just to like shave away at it like a sander but with diamond parts and that worked really well. It just like kind of cut it away like it was nothing and so I hollowed it out big enough to make a sound out of.

There's like different types of shells like some of them you can have a hole in the side and play it, but this one you need a hole in the front. And these are buttons that I soldered and glued on to here, and these are connected to the Max/MSP patch so when you push down a button, it just like sends a one or a zero to the patch, and that affects the pitch of the sound coming back out so I wanted to get like a recorder or flute effect so I can like play it like this, so this isn't my kind of style.

I also got this on eBay. It's just a little wireless microphone.

[BETHANY CHILDS PLAYING A CONCH SHELL TO CONTROL MAX/MSP]

It actually changed surprisingly little. I wasn't really sure if I was just going to run the audio through effects pedals but it turned out to be easiest to run it through a Max patch. It's kind of annoying to lug around my laptop when I'm playing it so maybe eventually I will attach it just to effects pedals but this is what I knew how to do and I couldn't have the materials to do and stuff like that. This I hadn't thought of when I first did the drawing design. This are just extra buttons that I'm going to hook up that I can push with my foot just to add a bigger range like I'll have these buttons play six notes, and then if this is pushed down, it'll play a higher six notes, and then these dials I also thought were going to be foot pedals but it turned out to have -- it was easier to have them as dials.

[BETHANY CHILDS PLAYING A CONCH SHELL TO CONTROL MAX/MSP]

One of them controls the delay, so if it's turned all the way down, there's no delay and then there's a variable amount on, and then I actually have two pitches that come out of the speaker, so one of them is controlled by this and the other one is controlled by this dial, and with the dial it can get like a kind of like a "Woooot!" sound like a quick range of pitches which I like the sound of so I didn't want it to just have it be jumping from pitch to pitch. I have taken electronics class in my freshman year of high school but I learned it all as I was doing it.

I don't know if I could imagine doing it differently. I would have to get better glue for these buttons because they're popping off.

I have a bunch of ideas. I'd like to still play it at experimental venues and collaborate with people but I also want to try and take it with my more traditional music. I was thinking about like playing sea shell with a drum kit and trying to get someone to sing with me and just like experiment with how it sounds and different types of music.