Tin Machine

​

Two motorised belts and supporting brackets salvaged from discarded scanner/printers are now adapted and amplified acoustically.

 

The cans used to amplify the sound from the belts are from tinned tomatoes that were kindly left in the apartment here at Ferme-Asile.

 

I decided to make my task more difficult by amplifying friction from the smooth side of the belts rather than the toothed side, as the sound this made was too similar to my previous project "Made to Malfunction". The sound is more tonal than percussive.

​

I added LED lamps as this accentuates the fact that the two devices are generating quite distinct sounds, different from each other.

​

The idea came to me through rediscovering some photographs of a phonograph I took at the Deutsches Phonomuseum in Sankt Georgen in the Black Forest, Germany. One in particular uses a tin can as an acoustic amplifier, a precursor of the gramophone horn.