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.

In here I have the Artbus, which is what connects it to the computer, and so just learning how to use this was really exciting for me. It's something that was designed by professors at the Art Institute, and it's basically a board that communicates with the computer and is made to work really well for building interfaces or sound-like installation environments, so this is an analog board, and so I can just like hook these buttons straight into the board like they're just attached through all these wires into the board and then it goes back through a cord through my laptop and sends signals. When I push the button, I turn the dials so that this just like made it easy to communicate with the computer in a way I didn't know how to do.

Right now, they're still designing them and producing them. Eventually, they will have them for sale and they're hoping to make them pretty cheap like around 5 bucks a piece or something.

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

In our class, they gave us all Artbuses to experiment with but only if you have a finished, polished project that they see as a good project. Well, they let you keep an Artbus board because these are handmade and they're time consuming.

[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.

What I'm doing right now is changing the pitch and the delay and then changing the pitch at the second output.

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

So these are corresponding to the buttons on the sea shell, so when I push them, you can see the X's appear, and you can see right here the pitches shifting. This is the delay, which I can change to the dial. Right here is the second pitch, which is controlled by another dial. So, this is the buttons that correspond to those.

GRETCHEN HASSE: All right. Then the different dials you're talking about over here?

BETHANY CHILDS: Mmm hmm. Then the delay and the pitch shifting.