Building a Transmission Device

Transmissions
Written By Jesse Black

I’ve been working on a problem:

I go out and make some field recordings. I come back to the studio, mix them and release them as short EPs. It works, people can listen to them on Bandcamp, buy it if they want and that’s all good. But it also means we interact with it the way we typically interact with music in an album or streaming form. It’s hard for those sounds to live in any other kind of realm. If it’s in the same music store Led Zeppelin CDs are in, your mind is going to approach it differently than if it was presented in a gallery.

I want to get closer to that gallery setting. To not view these pieces as music, but something physical a person can interact with. Something that feels like it’s from the same place the sounds are from, but far away and only attainable through this object. So I started drawing.

I don’t have a name for it yet other than a “Transmissions Box.” A little patch bay loaded up with a bunch of different sounds from one of the EPs. The user can take a ¼” cable and plug in to any output they want, tuning into that sound. A set of headphones and a volume knob are attached as well.

This does a few things for me:

One, it also gives me something that I can show in a gallery setting without all the connotations of an album. And two, it solves the interactivity issue by giving listeners a tangible sense of agency and choice. You have to plug into something, not just hit play. Not just that, but it supports the idea that our world isn’t something that we as humans live adjacent to, we’re part of the same ecosystem.

And… ok a crude drawing sure, but a good starting point! It lets me know what I need to figure out: (this is were the tech bit comes in)

  • What components and parts do I need to play back these sounds?

  • How do I power the thing?

  • How does it keep playing back on a loop?

The first thought I had were holiday cards that play back music. You can get the parts pretty cheap, and they’re simple enough; record or load a file and use a simple switch to play. Only problem is they don’t sound very good on account of the small storage size. I want to be able to play back the high quality 96k 24 bit masters which can be around 100-200 MB easy for a few minutes. I can find similar cards that have a little more space around 16 MB - still nowhere near what I would need. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

And so that brings me to a Raspberry Pi, a small singular use computer. This is also relatively straight forward: Get a Raspberry Pi 5 and a HAT (Hardware Attached to Top) that allows a multiple audio outputs like this one. That HAT only gives me eight channels, which means a box with four stereo field recordings inside. Small, but scalable!

So that’s where I’m headed. Get a PI5, that 8 channel HAT, mount it all to a piece of plywood and wire it up with a volume knob and a set of headphones.

Jesse Black